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What Ever Happened To Google Books?
An anonymous reader writes: Tim Wu at the New Yorker wonders about the present and future of Google Books. He calls it the most ambitious library project of our time — it seemed so promising when it started. Google developed the requisite technology, made the necessary partnerships to get it done, and put ridiculous amounts of effort into it. Despite their accomplishment, Google Books is merely a shadow of what it could have been. They just couldn't fight through the intellectual property issues that arose. "If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people's work.
Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it's Google. For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded, particularly when it came to weighing abstract and mainly worthless rights against the public's interest in gaining access to obscure works. Finally, the outside critics and the courts were entirely too sanguine about killing, as opposed to improving, a settlement that took so many years to put together, effectively setting the project back a decade if not longer."
Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it's Google. For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded, particularly when it came to weighing abstract and mainly worthless rights against the public's interest in gaining access to obscure works. Finally, the outside critics and the courts were entirely too sanguine about killing, as opposed to improving, a settlement that took so many years to put together, effectively setting the project back a decade if not longer."
Just fyi for the public, the lawsuit against Google Books was dismissed.
Google successfully used fair use as a defense and all claims were denied.
Personal profits to Google aside, they also scored a major precedent that will pave the way for future orphan works revivals.
The last time somebody tried this was the Library of Alexandria which required the dictates and commands of several kings. Even then they had to pay money to the Athenians to get some documents.
Well, that was because the Library wanted to make a copy of the original manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Athens was reluctant to allow the manuscripts to be sent to Alexandria (presumably they would've preferred to have them copied in Athens), but ultimately allowed it provided that the Library provided a cash deposit to ensure the safe return of the manuscripts.
Instead, predictably, the Library kept the originals and returned the copies, and was happy to forfeit the money, which was almost 500 kilograms of silver.
The normal M.O. of the Library was just to require that all documents going through Alexandria be available for copying by the Library, and to be a major port and trading hub so that a lot of documents happened to pass through.
It all worked pretty well (for a library that relied on hand-copying, the printing press not being invented yet) until some assholes burned the place down.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Regarding older public domain books, Google's efforts aren't very good, they get about a D for quality. You can check out the Internet archive, it has digitized copies of many pre-1900 works that were digitized by several companies independently. You'll find the company name in the files. I'm not a fan of M$, but their scans are way nicer than Google's. And if you compare with the works of some libraries such as the one in Goettingen, it's night and day.
Part of the reason is that Google's priorities are warped. They wanted to race ahead, digitize everything before anyone else. So they chose low resolution scans because that's faster. They hid their technology from the librarians who gave them the books, because OMG competitors! and they did a 60% OCR job on the easiest and cleanest books while completely ignoring the hard cases [eg mathematics, multilingual, etc].
The other thing their urgency got us was a legal morass. Google evilly just went ahead to scan all books, and published them on the web, while more responsible competitors were slowed down by getting permission first from the rights holders. When Google was too far ahead, the competing projects folded, and Google got (rightly) sued by the authors guild. That in turn caused a chilling effect on the projects that were left.
Now nobody wants to revisit the problem of orphan and older works, we're stuck with shitty google scans that are barely readable and full of OCR mistakes, and there's no telling how long we'll be having even that available freely on the web.
We didn't need to have Google do the bang up job they did. The world was cruising along, slowly digitizing works with care. Many universities were researching the issues, solving them one at a time, properly. Does anyone remember the Indian/US/Chinese million books project?
The best hope for the future now is the underground. At least the pirates care about producing quality releases - whether it's movies, music, or books. And they don't care about money, so the next generation will be able to download illegal books and educate themselves for free like many people do today.