Award-winning science fiction author Gwyneth Jones said she decided to opt out of the Google book settlement on the advice of her agent, David Higham Associates, and on the advice of Spraggs, “who had read the small print.”
“Then I was inspired to read the small print too, and I didn’t like what I found. Google’s preemptive action has turned copyright law on its head. It seems they plan, unilaterally, to take ownership away from the writer, and the ownership doesn’t pass to the readers (fat chance!) but to a giant profit-making corporation. A vast entity allegedly intent on ‘doing nothing evil’ has simply decided this will be so, and then hired a fleet of lawyers to make it happen,” she said.
“The danger to me, and every other writer, is not that our works will be available free online (I offer most of my recent novels free online already. These ‘portable document format’ novels are the text as I wrote it, and they do my sales no harm at all). The danger of the digital ‘publishing’ corporations is their unprecedented access to billions of tiny payments, for product that costs them effectively nothing, at their point of entry,” she said. “This seems to mean they don’t have to worry about any form of resistance at all. I don’t like the sound of that, not from anybody’s point of view,” she said.
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