Librarians Express Concern Over Google Books

angry tapir writes "Many libraries routinely delete borrower information, and organizations such as the American Library Association have fought hard to preserve the privacy of their patrons in the face of laws such as the US Patriot Act. But now, as more and more titles become available in Google Book Search, it's not clear whether digital readers will enjoy the same privacy protections they have at the library."

Comments

Torrents

[Krneki]

Ha!

Re:Torrents

[lysergic.acid]

Yea, but torrents still don't have the selection (or diversity of subjects) of books that libraries have. I've tried to find a lot of fairly popular books, but aside from well-known classics or very very mainstream titles (e.g. Harry Potter), you'll be hard pressed to find on torrents. And even then, book torrents tend to have very short shelf-lives (no pun intended). I often come across torrents of books I'm searching for, only to find that they were posted 2-3 years ago and are long dead.

Google Book Search was such a promising project. And the company itself has proven to be trustworthy (with them resisting government subpoenas and fighting to withhold user data from government agencies, unlike some other megacorporations). I was so disappointed when it was complaints over copyright violations by publishers rather than any technological or resource limitations that crippled the project (basically killing the project as it was originally conceived). So instead of giving every child, every student, and indeed every person with a computer and internet connection, free and instant access to all the literature humanity has ever published (ie. the largest corpus of human knowledge ever compiled) in a fully indexed, cataloged, and searchable digital format, we instead just have a small dappling of publisher-provided promotional samples of old, semi-obscure texts that aren't selling that well in stores.

Somehow we decided as a society (we're supposedly a "democracy" after all) that commercial profits are more important than the huge boon to society that such a cultural & informational/educational resource would have been. It would have been less of an affront if it had been a coalition of authors who objected to the project's existence in its original form. And even if publishers are worried that this would have threatened their profits, it would have been far more preferable to work out some kind of deal in which the digital library would be publicly-subsidized, with that money being used to compensate publishers (within reason). I'd be willing to pay more in taxes to support such a project.

Just like public education caused a cultural revolution (or evolution) in our society, I imagine making published materials so much more accessible, and to so many more people, in one fell swoop would have similarly caused an intellectual revolution (internationally). Every computer would immediately become the largest library in the world. Access to books won't ever be limited by the number of physical copies available. Out of print books would never again be lost to society. And people for whom the library is currently not accessible—whether because they have none located near them, lack transportation, are bed-ridden, are blind, or have been subjected to a recent book-burning campaign—would benefit unimaginably from such a resource. I mean, you could go to rural village in a poor developing country, and as long as they had a phone line (you could even get internet access by satellite) you'd be able to set up a $300 computer with a screen reader and give the children in that village access to all the books ever published, even if everyone in the village is illiterate.

The internet itself has been a huge boon to society, but as useful as it is now, it would be a million times more useful if copyright issues took backseat to societal progress and public good.

Re:Torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they're not. The more you try to evade the system the more the system will try to adapt.

The correct response to something you don't agree with is to support something you do.

If you don't support the companies that do business the way you would like business done, and you "take" (let's just use that word and avoid getting the wrong debate going), from the companies that you feel have bad practices, you have not done anything to further your cause.

Re:Torrents

[Yvanhoe]

I remember the first glorious days of file sharing. Categoryzing, tagging, all was done by the community and worked fairly well. Torrents are a mess because they are illegal. Make it legal and expect dozens of website to propose huge online librairies correctly sorted.

Question

[MyLongNickName]

Don't these hard copy books still exist after Google has "digitized" them? If you re concerned over your privacy, simply go to the physical library as you would have before the digitization.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The "counterview" would be that virtually all internet users by now know that the government is, or should be treated as being, able to look up every keystroke they have made on the internet, if the government ever wants to. I certainly use the internet with that view.

Re:Question

[ATestR]

Yes, but....

Funding for libraries is usually tight. If fewer people are using the library, it will become even tighter. I can foresee a day in the not too distant future when many libraries (especially in smaller towns and cities) can't complete in light of the availability of books from sources like Google Books.

Re:Question

[Mr. Underbridge]

Don't these hard copy books still exist after Google has "digitized" them? If you re concerned over your privacy, simply go to the physical library as you would have before the digitization.

Yes, in about the same way that pay phones still exist after the advent of cell phones. And in the same way, we can expect the availability to gradually dwindle until the option no longer exists. Let's not wait until that point to solve the problem.

Re:Question

[jafiwam]

It is my opinion that folk who make this mistake will do so long before it becomes important for books.

Those people will put up pot-smoking in underwear pictures on Facebook or MySpace long before they have any political views worth anything. (At least to the _government_, let's face it, the librarians are worried about _governments_ with this information.)

Then, they will learn the hard lesson by being busted, denied a job, denied a slot in graduate school, or just basically ridiculed.

This will happen years before they get to the point where they might be a) reading interesting books b) that are on some "watch list".

With Google having the information, it's not as bad as one might think. Any jackass county sheriff or otherwise corrupt Barney Fyfe can walk into a library. While at this point the only government folk able to get much out of Google are the feds.

Either way, someone wanting to anonymously get information should use BitTorrent. There are TONS of books out there in PDF and other formats.

Re:Question

[Petrushka]

Don't these hard copy books still exist after Google has "digitized" them? If you re concerned over your privacy, simply go to the physical library as you would have before the digitization.

They don't necessarily exist. Recently I was looking for a relatively esoteric book on a particular ancient Greek author's parodying of bits of the New Testament. Now, careful checking showed that no library in my home town has the book; even more careful checking showed that the nearest library that had it is 9700 km [sic] away. The book was published in the early 1960s, so it's under copyright.

Now, this book is not everyone's cup of tea, sure, but that's kind of the point of books: they make information accessible to people who need that information when they need it. Market forces shouldn't constrain that kind of thing: just because I happen to be the only person on my side of the planet who's interested in the topic shouldn't mean that all information on that topic should vanish. To insist that market forces should be the only force in operation is to insist that all specialised knowledge should vanish forever without trace.

So what are my choices? I could

1. pay vast sums to borrow the book by interlibrary loan from a library 9700 km away
2. get my local library to contact an overseas library and get them to make an illegal copy and send it to me
3. find a torrent of the book -- yeah, right
4. look up the bit of the book I needed on Google Books

Of these, option 1 is expensive and time-consuming, but also the only legal option; options 2, 3, and 4 are illegal; option 2 is, I think, justly illegal, and would moreover require that someone else break the law on my behalf; option 3 is just ludicrous; option 4 is illegal, but only because of unbalanced copyright laws.

I submit that legitimising option 4 would be A Good Thing.

As it turned out, option 2 was the one that actually happened. A library in Europe was good enough to break the law for me. (To return the favour, I won't name names.)

Your Personal Data is Google's Revenue Source

[RobotRunAmok]

Whether it's your G-Mail contact list, your search history, or what books you check out from from their "library," your data is Google's stock in trade. This is the price of "free." For most people, it's a much better than even proposition. For the paranoid and privacy conscious, it's a deal breaker. And the notion that Google is providing this information to the US government is merely an urban myth, so get that idea right out of your head this instant...

Re:Your Personal Data is Google's Revenue Source

[characterZer0]

But if Google has the data and the government issues a subpoena. . .

Hardly possible

[moon3]

Google is making the books searchable with one intent in mind, to know what you are searching for, so they can offer relevant ads and targeted marketing leads.

Nothing to do with preserving jobs, then?

[petes_PoV]

While their altruism is to be applauded: working to preserve people's privacy, I would find this "concern" over Google books more credible if it wasn't being advocated by one of the groups of workers who stand to lose the most from having a vast body of literature made easily available to individuals (or as librarians might call them: customers) without having to go to their local library.

This sounds to me like nothing more than the librarians trying to keep their jobs. While I don't disagree with that, I would appreciate it if they wouldn't take us for fools and try to wrap this up as some sort of "mission" they're on. Some honesty and transparency would get them more support.

Re:Nothing to do with preserving jobs, then?

[MyLongNickName]

I would find this "concern" over Google books more credible if it wasn't being advocated by one of the groups of workers who stand to lose the most from having a vast body of literature made easily available to individuals (or as librarians might call them: customers) without having to go to their local library.

And I would find Global Warming more believable, if it wasn't initiated by climatologists who get more funding when as a scare tactic, this would raise more money in funding for the said group.

You do see that the fallacy of this argument, right?

Re:Nothing to do with preserving jobs, then?

[skangas]

Google will only find you the books you are asking it to find. Consider a high school student looking for information on a certain event in World War II. Sure, she could google "world war 2", but then what? If she doesn't know what she's looking for, she's completely lost from that point on. A good librarian, on the other hand, could help our hypothetical student and guide her between the different sources of information: encyclopedias, litterature, magazines, maybe even movies. Sure, nobody's perfect, but it's much better to have someone to talk to than to be presented with a prompt for keywords, especially when you don't know what those keywords might be. The job description of a librarian, simply put, is wider than "take keywords, fetch books relevant to those keywords". Google might be good for when you know what you're looking for. Librarians is for everything else.

Re:Anything to keep the status quo going...

[natehoy]

PS: Now if my local library could get access to Google Books, allowing me to anonymously get ebooks through them and Google would only be aware of my library's credentials, with my library protecting my privacy, that'd be a serious win.

Google Books is not a library

[fermion]

A library is more than a collection of printed pages. It is a professional that can help you find those pages. It is years of custom that allows a patron to read those pages without undue government interference. Sure, it is paid for the government, but it is paid knowing that an educated populous is critical to democracy. Some would argue that a dangerous person might be planning an attack on their government using the library, or might be planning something that others might not like, for instance researching the facts to prepare for an abortion, but those people who wish to limit the freedoms of the library are trading security for democracy and deserve neither.

Google books, OTOH, is just a collection of pages. The pages you read are part of their database, which they will use to understand and better serve the user, and, if the committee on un-American affairs come knocking, will likely give up quite willingly. Furthermore, while modern database search has become very easy, researching a topic is still not trivial. Serious searches will still turn up more trivia than useful fact. If we confuse google with a library, there is a chance that our educational opportunities might become limited. The child that wants to read about their emerging sexuality, for example, instead of just playing it out through naked pictures, may not be able to do so. This is an unknown thing,and there is nothing wrong with thinking about ramifications, as long as we realize this thing is going to happen no matter what.

Re:More Nonsense

[Aladrin]

Then Google should do things the right way, the first time, and then nobody would stand up to criticize them.

In this case, all Google has to do is say that information about who read what book will -not- be stored, and this 'concern' goes away. It's a legit concern, and easily rectified.

Re:Easy solution...

[Miseph]

"it won't make untrackable but nothing really is"

QFT. You are not anonymous because you're so smart, you're anonymous because nobody cares enough to track you down. Be very careful not to change that.

I call FUD.

[FlyingBishop]

Google doesn't want to have to deal with subpoenas for information any more than libraries do. That's why they anonymize the data after nine months.

artificial scarcity

[Lord Ender]

Librarians are also concerned because they see the writing on the wall. Libraries may not be needed in the near future. We have the technology today to make every book in existence available to every human on the planet, and in an instantly-searchable format. This is the sort of thing a global Renaissance is made of! The only thing holding humanity back, at this point, is politics. We have IP law that relies on artificial scarcity. This is the opposite of what the goal of IP should be.

The purpose of IP law should be to encourage science and the useful arts while making their benefits available to everyone.

Re:artificial scarcity

[natehoy]

If Google Books eliminates scarcity, that's a good thing. This was the original purpose of libraries themselves, allowing anyone access to any book they want to read for free, and if Google can become "Library 2.0", great.

It will not, however, eliminate the need for "Library 1.0". I don't know about your library, but ours is a vibrant community center. Sure, they sign out books, but if you eliminated every book from the library they'd still have patrons in there every day. You can hold meetings there in one of the conference rooms, you can access the Internet, there are programs for children and adults there (OK, many of them centered around books, so if you eliminated all the books someone would have to bring some... grin).

And, of course, there are still a few of us 40+ grumpy old curmudgeons who simply prefer the feel of real paper in our hands when we read. Not that I'd mind an e-book terribly, but holding actual dead trees has become part of the reading experience to us.

I'm sure there are some libraries that have turned into emotionless, community-less book repositories, but there are a good number of them that will survive long after the desire for printed book material goes away, if it ever does.

Re:More Nonsense

[N1AK]

I, for one, am getting really fed up with people trying to get in the way of Google, and others making more information available, for free.

And I'm fed up of people not being able to see costs that aren't prefaced by a $ sign. Google is in the fortunate position of having a monopoly on digitising orphaned works, and it got this monopoly by agreeing to pay an organisation which often has nothing to do with the creation of those works and no intention of paying the authors.

There is practically no slashdotter who doesn't like the idea of digitising these works, but most are able to see the wood for the trees, and that means opposing the creation of yet another monopoly.