It is almost a year to the day since Google announced its plans to digitize the collections of five of the worlds great libraries through it’s Google Print Library service. When complete, the project will allow anyone anywhere to search for books using Google Book Search which, like the standard search engine, will return indexed results that provide basic information about each book plus a few snippets from its pages.
Google says its aim is ‘to make it easier for people to find relevant books – specifically books they wouldn’t find any other way such as those that are out of print – while carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights.’ But the proposals have attracted a much-publicised lawsuit from the United States Authors Guild and are of concern to librarians worried the search engine’s easy-to-use search style will make users reluctant to conduct searches using more complex strategies to obtain better results.
One thing is clear, Google’s motives are not purely altruistic. Whilst Google Print Library will provide convenient access to electronic versions of millions of books, including those that are rare and/or out-of-print (currently held in libraries at Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan and the New York Public library), to anyone connected to the internet, the company also stands to make a lot of money in process.
Revenue for Google will come in the form of referral fees paid by publishers and possibly related advertising on the search results pages. For out-of-copyright books, Google would be able to charge a download fee to users, and this is the area that could prove most lucrative. In the meantime it is picking up the cost of scanning the books (estimated to be over U.S. $150 million). Publishers that do not want their books to be scanned have been given the option to opt-out of the process so a search for their titles will not yield any results.
The crux of the lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild is that copyright owners should not have to ‘opt-out’ but that Google should first seek permission to scan. According to Pat Schroeder, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, the project project sets a dangerous precedent. ‘If Google can go and copy what’s in the library without permission, then everybody can copy it without permission,’ she says.
In the UK, a children’s hospital that relies on royalties from the sale of Peter Pan books fears that the Google Print Library will have a dramatic and negative impact on its revenue. Publishers and some librarians have also voiced concerns recently about the absence of any plans for Google to share revenue earned through its virtual library.
On the flip side, some publishers value the added exposure the new system will generate for titles. ‘For a typical author, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy,’ said Tim O’Reilly, chief executive of O’Reilly Media and an adviser to Google’s project. “Google is offering publishers an amazing opportunity for people to discover their content.’
Faced with legal challenges and public bemusement, Google temporarily suspended its scanners in August this year to give owners of copyright time to opt out of the program. However, the self-imposed hiatus ended last month when Google announced it would resume scanning with an initial focus on books that are out of copyright.
It appears that this project is so innovative it has outrun existing legislation by too far a margin for many to feel comfortable, and the court challenge to Google’s plans therefore represents an important legal benchmark in relation to how governments legislate for information held and accessed online.
Whether it is publishers, users or Google who ultimately reap the greatest benefits, the other beneficiary according to cyber-geeks could be the world’s first true Artificial Intelligence that, by devouring the knowledge Google scans from millions of books, will soon accrue enough knowledge to take over the world – just like the corporation that gave it life.
