When some executives of Google came to the Publishers Association to discuss their plans for digitising in copyright material they brought with them two 'communications consultants' better known in English as spin doctors. I wondered why. I now know.

I do not not know the business editor of the Times, James Harding. I assume he's an intelligent and diligent journalist who does his best to report and comment accurately. What then explains this article? How does an announcement that Google is digitising some classic and out of copyright books make the main leader in the business section of a great newspaper? The business impact is close to zilch. The books mentioned have already been digitised many times over and so it's really not news. Google have already press released any number of times about their various library scanning projects. And purple prose such as this:

Google may have just done for book-reading what e-mail has done for letter-writing. Yesterday the internet search engine started making classic, out-of-copyright books available to download and print free. The service makes available to everyone the dusty pages of old tomes that once were reserved only for those with privileged access to the likes of the Bodleian library in Oxford and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Google likes to boast that its mission is to organise the world’s information, but it is doing something better than that: it is is democratising it.

But the bit that's really got my dander up is where he (or a spin doctor?) says:'Inevitably, the Google service has been greeted by the book industry with the kind of welcome normally reserved for a can of kerosene and a box of matches.' This is garbage. The industry has no quarrel at all with Google over the digitisation and searchability of out of copyright works. We quarrel with them over the use of the copyright material produced by authors whose copyright we are obliged to protect. They wish to usurp that copyright without prior permission. That is our argument and it is straightforward to understand. Presumably the 'communication consultants' failed to make that clear to James Harding and he didn't think it worth finding out why publishers have reacted the way they have. The positive publicity - e.g. the headline of the article, 'Google does book-reading a huge favour' - will  certainly have justified the spin doctors' doubtless exorbitant fees but, frankly, it makes me feel a bit queasy and I wonder what else I should recognise as complete rubbish in the Times.

Coincidentally in the same issue of the paper there are big articles on page 2 of Times 2 on Paris Hilton and Jeffrey Archer. After yesterday's blog should I begin to suspect a conspiracy? I also wondered yesterday whether juxtaposing the names would increase traffic? The answer is no. We had 1628 visitors yesterday against an August average of just over 1500 a day. In scientific research, negative results can be just as valuable as positive ones, albeit slightly less fulfilling.