Just two of the alternative adjectives which could have been used by Cory Boing in this introduction to a boohooery paste from Kottke:
One of Kottke’s readers is a writer named Meghann Marco whose publisher is joined to the suit against Google over the excellent, writer-friendly Google Print service. She has written an amazing open letter to her publisher…
What would have been really amazing would be if the author had actually negotiated terms in her publishing agreement allowing her this freedom before signing and before receiving and I would expect keeping the money she is being paid by said dark lord of the print shop. It would also be amazing to set up a publishing house that allowed for the realistic return of revenue and provided for multi-media options fairly and openly. Advocating for that would be excellent and writer-friendly and based on something better than mere complaint. Instead “excellent, writer-friendly” is reserved for a tool of an entity that is doing all it can apparently to corner the web in a manner that should have Bill Gates’s jealous head spinning; that seemingly avoids respecting the rights of the works of the authors like those backing the suit; that appears to want to breaks the association of thinker and thought to undermine the economics that allow for the slow and solid development of good thought; and which generally lives behind a creepy grey walls of silence upon which “do good things” or some other such banality is etch-a-sketched.
You know I own one share of the monoGoog, the bubble of one, as I plan to destroy it from within but that is my project not yours. Love it now. You may will fear it next. Hmm – how about an open-source search engine? Can I build one of those now that I know how to center an image?