Google Slows Library Project to Accommodate Publishers

Late in May, a group of publishers challenged the Google Print for Libraries program as a major breach of copyright. Oddly enough, the group was the Association of American University Presses (AAUP; http://www.aaupnet.org), a group of nonprofit, self-confessed niche market publishers whom, one might have thought, would have seen the Google Print program as ideal for broadening their market. (See "Google Library Project Hit by Copyright Challenge from University Presses," http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb050531-2.shtml.) The Association of American Publishers (http://www.publishers.org), which represents commercial publishers primarily, and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (http://www.alpsp.org) soon chimed in with similar objections. While none of the groups objected to Google Print for Publishers, where the publishers make the decision as to whether to join and what to contribute, the groups were alarmed at seeing their copyrighted content "shanghai-ed" into the program through the digitization of library book collections.

Out of curiosity, what happens when a company or other group decides to do this in a place that doesn't particularly care about U.S. copyright law?

Today I am all about sending e-mails and looking at pictures of Ethiopia. One e-mail was about pictures of Ethopia, and it was a dopey little missive sent to a famous person. So, while still peaking on my fan letter rush, I figured I would continue talking about my now long-passed trip to Texas. Only I can't find my notebook at the moment, so we'll have to do without precise dates. Or memories.

The Day After The Last One, Houston To Outer Space

I really didn't know what we were going to be doing this day. After the, uh, unpleasantness re navigational choices the previous evening, I wasn't expecting a talkative walk through the highlights of downtown Houston. But I had wanted to go to the Johnson Space Center, and I guess it passed the "interesting but not so interesting as to promote unstructured leisure" test, because we were on our way early in the morning.

All things considered, I didn't really see much archetypal Texan imagery during the trip. No vast herds of longhorn, and cowboy hats seemed to be only slightly more present in public gatherings. But south of Houston I did finally see oil. Black gold! Or, rather, I saw oil refineries, which looked like the fruit of a collision between a pipe-making concern and a horde of obsessive welders. From many of these flames actually lept into the air at regular intervals. This was impressively ominous.

I hadn't paid much attention to the odometer, but we had gone from mesquite to palm trees over the past three days. Curiously, we passed a stand of palms near the freeway which weren't actually planted in the ground, and were being held upright by guidewires. If I was smarter I could draw some interesting parallel to the fact that we were now in the zone where hurricanes occasionally lean out of the sea and erase the landscape. Like, you know, maybe this is all just some sort of Potemkin Texas.

But then we were at the Space Center, helpfully located on NASA Road One. Then we drove past it. Then we turned around and went into the parking lot. I do not remember how much it cost to park there, but come on, NASA. Your small, relatively tasteful yet expensive gift shop surely pulls in enough revenue. Or it probably doesn't, but anyway. There's a jet parked in front of the visitor's center, and it is suddenly occuring to me that, for someone blogging about a very nerdy trip to see some spacecraft, I'm not very conversant in the technical details. It was one of them, you know, jets they use to train pilots. I may or may not have taken a picture of it. I did, however, take a picture of the vending machine that sold only M&Ms.

The center of the visitor's center is very, very exciting if you are ten years old and are really into spacecraft. I speak from experience. Its appeal is slightly blunted if you don't get there for another 15 years. But the real meat of the place is elsewhere. Anyway, we walked through the shuttle mockup (not, of course, the actual training version, but the one in visitor's center) and listened to an elderly engineer who had apparently been describing space shuttle operations in simple terms for a very long time. He was not particularly optimistic about there ever being a new vehicle to replace the shuttle. We saw some space suits. We went on one of two tram tours through the Space Center proper. Ours was heading towards the large training facility you sometimes see, with the various full-sized shuttles and station components. This was impressive. We also saw the warehouse where these are shelved. (Or, rather, I believe that's what they were.) There did seem to be a certain melancholy in the air, but perhaps that was just me.

There was a short film to watch before you got into the relatively small museum area where actual factual spacecraft were displayed in low-lit diaramas. Your usual golf balls on the moon and smiling Cosmonauts through the hatch stuff. I liked it, anyway. And then, spaceships! Everyone will say that they are smaller than they expected. It's true nevertheless. Apollo 17's command module was there, and while it was surrounded by a mostly symbolic rope barrier, the hatch was open to allow you to see inside, and you could reach out and touch it. Which I did, of course, because here was a piece of metal that had once orbited the Moon.

And then there was the Moon rock. Suspended in a very large pedastal, designed such that you could only touch it, that is, that you couldn't get near it in such a way as to get any leverage on it, or pick at it, or anything. It was worn smooth by a river of human hands. Plenty of other lunar rock and, check this out, regolith, was on display, safely behind glass.

Here's the thing about touching a Moon rock: It's just an unusual-looking rock, you think, which I happen to be touching. Just a rock which happened to sit on the surface of the Moon for untold millions if not billions of years until some astronaut happened to stroll by and stick it in his pocket. The experience is a violent collision between the mundane and the sublime.

At this point it was time to go, though I hadn't even gotten to the big Skylab display. Apparently I'm alone in the habit of bothering to read the descriptive plaques mounted next to, say, a glove that once was worn in orbit.

Afterwards we drove back to Fort Worth, through the only Texan forest I saw, past a large statue of Sam Houston I may have a photograph of, and past the Texas prison museum. Alas.

(The Johnson Space Center's visitor center: itself seen from space!)

((The jet was a T-38. The M&Ms went sadly unpurchased.))