Google halts its newspaper digitization operations

why doesn't google start a subscription service where you pay like $5 a month and you have access to all the newspapers, which will be better than no money.

Originally posted by toked:

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why doesn't google start a subscription service where you pay like $5 a month and you have access to all the newspapers, which will be better than no money.

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Because they are not doing it for charity. If they had to charge $5 userbase would shrink significantly meaning less people would see google's ads on that service. This means that they would probably get less money. What is surprising is that they didn't figure out any other payment plan like some % of ad revenue from ads that are associated with their articles. I still hope this is just googles way of saying "take our offer or you get nothing", to offer we don't know about.

Also i don't think google has any non-enterprise services that actually cost something to use or do they?

While I like the idea of a central cloud with everything, it brings to mind the classic "1984"...it is a real bother to modify and destroy originals scattered throughout countless private collections, but it is very easy to "correct" history if everything is in a cloud.