This partnership and program has a great deal going for it–a very interesting model, lots of good ideas, potentially great materials being made available by exploiting a print-on-demand structure that will likely be the future of publishing.

I am skeptical about Lotfi’s statement that storage costs more than digitization. Admittedly, I have not done an appropriate cost analysis on mass digitization (perhaps someone who has can tell offer some numbers and tell me I’m way off base), but I am very doubtful that the costs of storage (which I *have* priced out recently) can amount to anything more than a fraction of the Kirtas machine and labor to feed it books, convert the images, create the metadata, analyze the copyright, etc for 15-20 years (the amount of time it would take to digitize Emory’s 200,000 books at the rate of “tens of thousands” a year on one Kirtas machine).

It also seems to me that Kirtas/Amazon/Emory et al. are doing themselves a disservice by comparing themselves to the Google Library project. I am a great friend of Emory’s, but I have to call it like I see it. I think it is unfortunate that the presenters chose to set their tone as our-model-versus-google-and-we-win. There is a lot of room in the digitization space for everyone to thrive without targeting other libraries and saying their digitization “isn’t worth the cost of storage” (as Lotfi put on the screen in BOLD CAPS referring to the Google Library project) or saying that your aims are more noble because you have the public interest and welfare at heart, unlike the supposed “competition”. I’m sure Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, the University of California, the CIC, etc, etc would be surprised to find out that they have abandoned the public good by partnering with Google. It’s also not great to make false statements in trying to distinguish yourself, such as that Google Book Search has no color images and that the Google libraries don’t have ownership or control of any of the images.

To be fair, perhaps Lotfi was just trying to say that Google had no interest in the public good because they are a commercial search company. That accusation wears a little thin when it’s hurled at a company that does all of the digitization, conversion, markup, indexing, discovery, and delivery for not one penny on millions of books so far and counting; not only that, but has donated millions of dollars to the Library of Congress for digital library initiatives. It starts to sound like little more than a shrill marketing stance when it comes from a company that is in the business of selling scanners at $100,000 a pop and an online bookseller that wants to sell those out-of-print books for $25 a copy.

These aren’t criticisms of any of the members of this project per se. I think the Kirtas machine is a very cool device, the collections are certainly worthwhile, Emory is a great library with great people, and it’s a remarkable idea to use Print on Demand technology to such a worthy end. But it is a very different animal than the Google Library project, and if it is going to beg the comparisons, I don’t think it will stand up very well. Let it ride on its own merits.