More on GooglePhobia

New York Magazine columnist John Heilemann has written a scathing/funny/pathetic tale about GooglePhobia which reflects life and reality a lot more than the Authors Guild and American Association of Publishers would prefer:

Scathing: "And then there’s the book business. Now, it’s fair (albeit unkind) to say that publishers have earned a reputation as the most stubbornly analog of media concerns: If music and movie companies are dinosaurs in the Darwinian scheme of electronic evolution, publishers are moss-draped invertebrates still sloshing around in the primordial soup. Compared with book people, even newspaper people are a more Web-savvy species."

Funny: "In France, Jacques Chirac has ordered his minions to gin up a French and German search engine—on the grounds that Google is (wait for it) a tool of U.S. cultural imperialism."

Pathetic: What the publishing industry is showing, actually, is that its own stance is about more than books as well. It’s about posturing and pride, ego and vanity, about the defensiveness of an industry that’s been called “flat-earthers” one too many times for its liking."

Read this article. Every word of it. The future is here regardless of whether the writing/publishing world wants to acknowledge it. But then you knew I felt that way if you read Publisaurus Rex, my previous post on this