Less than two months after reaching a deal with Microsoft, the University of California has agreed to let Google scan its vast holdings (over 34 million volumes) into the Book Search database. Google will undoubtedly dig deeper into the holdings of the ten-campus system’s 100-plus libraries than Microsoft, which is a member of the more copyright-cautious Open Content Alliance, and will focus primarily on books unambiguously in the public domain. The Google-UC alliance comes as major lawsuits against Google from the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers are still in the evidence-gathering phase.
Meanwhile, across the drink, French publishing group La Martiniè re in June brought suit against Google for “counterfeiting and breach of intellectual property rights.” Pretty much the same claim as the American industry plaintiffs. Later that month, however, German publishing conglomerate WBG dropped a petition for a preliminary injunction against Google after a Hamburg court told them that they probably wouldn’t win. So what might the future hold? The European crystal ball is murky at best.
During this period of uncertainty, the OCA seems content to let Google be the legal lightning rod. If Google prevails, however, Microsoft and Yahoo will have a lot of catching up to do in stocking their book databases. But the two efforts may not be in such close competition as it would initially seem.
Google’s library initiative is an extremely bold commercial gambit. If it wins its cases, it stands to make a great deal of money, even after the tens of millions it is spending on the scanning and indexing the billions of pages, off a tiny commodity: the text snippet. But far from being the seed of a new literary remix culture, as Kevin Kelly would have us believe (and John Updike would have us lament), the snippet is simply an advertising hook for a vast ad network. Google’s not the Library of Babel, it’s the most sublimely sophisticated advertising company the world has ever seen (see this funny reflection on “snippet-dangling”). The OCA, on the other hand, is aimed at creating a legitimate online library, where books are not a means for profit, but an end in themselves.
Brewster Kahle, the founder and leader of the OCA, has a rather immodest aim: “to build the great library.” “That was the goal I set for myself 25 years ago,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in a profile last year. “It is now technically possible to live up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria.”
So while Google’s venture may be more daring, more outrageous, more exhaustive, more — you name it –, the OCA may, in its slow, cautious, more idealistic way, be building the foundations of something far more important and useful. Plus, Kahle’s got the Bookmobile. How can you not love the Bookmobile?
you speak truth to power, but you are a vox clamantis in deserto… UC putting its weight behind Google, for all of its claim that it’s still BFF with OCA, doesn’t bode well.
Before I agree that Google Book is doing a cool thing by digitizing old library books will someone just tell me how many they have done so far.
The latest Kirtas scanner is a beauty evoking the speed, action, flexibility and precision of the Heidelberg windmill jobber. In a curious way it is a printing press, reprinting books.
If Google Print does even partially succeed in conversion of research library book conversion it would be wise to invest in the paper making and edition binding industry. Google Print and many other applications of the Kirtas book scanner will result in massive enterprise in print-on-demand services.
Brewster Kahle’s done a lot of talking about print-on-demand, but I don’t think I’ve heard anything from Google even remotely connected with that.
The surge in book-on demand would come from the larger market for “books in print” provided by the Google imaging. Companies large and small like Lightning Source or Acme Books will realize a whole new production stream. They will quickly build Amazon like fronts to meet the demand and build on it.
Such an emergence will also factor into the future of the book regarding paper vs. screen reading. It would be ironic if the most massive effort to bring books to the screen actually resulted in their reprinting.
***boogle
Will the Google “digital copy” really access out of copyright books? Certainly Google Print will provide a different bibliographical utility or indexing for these books, but why presume that a precisely formatted conceptual work will suddenly be more easily referenced, assimilated and comprehended on the screen? That’s something like saying these books will be easier to use if they are on television.
Now Google is very protective of its “digital copy” assuming that the screen parsing and presentation is the proprietary product. But what if readers turn Google Print into a different kind of engine? What if an Amazon-like blog, front end simply processes Google finds across different reading communities, identifies titles of interest and goes to the stacks to scan for print-on-demand?
gary said:
> It would be ironic if the most massive effort
> to bring books to the screen actually resulted
> in their reprinting.
well, i don’t think it’s ironic in the slightest;
on the contrary, it’s the natural order of things.
if you want a paper-copy of a book badly enough
to pay for the cost of printing it (whether you
do it yourself or have someone do it for you),
then you’ll create a paper-copy from the e-copy,
once you have the e-copy. that’s not “ironic”…
but given the cost, most people will likely decide
that their e-copy is “good enough” for most books.
google has scanned over 100,000 books so far, and
very few people could afford to print all of them.
but once they are all turned into digital text,
most of us will be able to afford to store them
in our home machines…
-bowerbird
Plus books begin as digital objects these days; it shortens the loop (and takes a lot of pressure off the environment) if they stay digital until they need to be printed.
We aren’t there yet with the digital book, but making a lot of content available online is a start… though putting so much content into Google’s proprietary mystery-meat silo should give us pause. (Calling OCA, hello!)
Whether access will be affordable for the masses is a question we should all focus on, as well.
k.g. said:
> We aren’t there yet with the digital book
i’d be interested in your list of shortcomings.
-bowerbird
The screen based book is deficient in legibility, persistence and haptic assimilation.
Lack of legibility of the screen reading mode results from slow system transmission, broken links and browser errors. On-line presentations are authentically illegible as the reader, disconnected, watches a download monitor or waits as the browser fails to draw an overlayed text block. Other illegibilities are presented by interrupting sign-in or registration screens, to say nothing of unrequested pop-ups. Finally, navigational transactions continually interrupt reading. Such impediments to comprehension will be dismissed by on-line reading advocates as temporary deficiencies correctable by the advance of technologies of connectivity. But the reverse appears to be happening. Link rot, application up-grades, email congestion and system cut-overs all load further illegibility to on-screen reading. Meanwhile the paper book maintains its well refined legibility across immense technological advances.
Differences in persistence of texts can be immense. The papyrus codex delivered Gnostic gospels to receptive researchers exactly on time, sixteen centuries later. The screen based mode assures access over much shorter periods. Backward software compatibility expires in five years. In terms of reliable transmission of content across time, which technology, the papyrus codex or the computer medium, is more advanced?
Another important difference between hand held reading devices is haptic difference. The haptic feature most embedded in the paper book is that of conveying concepts as if they were physical projectiles. At first it is odd that concepts should be conveyed by physical objects. Electronic transmission better mimics the neural connectivity of the mind, but the physical book better engages the hands to prompt the mind. We always recall read precepts in their physical location on the page of a specific book. Other fingerings of page turning and manipulations of book structure work as prompts to our progression through content. In contrast to the manual punctuation of the page and the physical clock of content of the codex, the on-line page is manipulated with impaired haptic feedback. The “previous/next” click, the cursor slider and scroll tabs utilize grip and finger motion directed to the mouse and keyboard, but not to the substrate of the text. At least two other layers of interruption intervene. There is the electrified, rather than manual, instigation and an indirect interfacing via the navigational software. With a paper book, the reader is the interface.
gary-
thanks for your response.
the bulk of what you have said is
unconvincing to me, just as i’m sure
the bulk of what i would say in reply
would be equally unconvincing to you.
perhaps we need a good p.o.d. system
— papyrus on demand — to ensure
that our culture survives this age.
of course, if the politicians kill us
all with their wars for territory and
oil, none of this will matter much…
have a nice day. :+)
-bowerbird