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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."
"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."
This assumes that non-profits are somehow honorable and trustworthy. I suppose that some are worthy but unless they are up front with their financials I don't trust them at all. The voice of experience.
OTOH, if Google donated the results of their acquisitions to the Library of Congress or other body above reproach, yeah go for it! I don't recall ever hearing of a lawsuit against the LoC, but too lazy to check.
...omphaloskepsis often...
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.
Knowledge is power. Power isn't easily shared.
Unfortunately, I can't read TFA because it's behind a paywall, so I'm not really sure what the article is complaining about.
However, it should be noted that Google actually DID convince a number of major libraries (like Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, etc.) to share huge amounts of their material. I remember the discussions among librarians when this idea was first being floated, and nobody thought they'd ever get major research libraries with huge amounts of old books to go along with it -- but they did.
So, while "knowledge is power," Google made great strides in getting big, old, rich libraries to make lots of their information available to the public.
Thus, to my mind, Google Books is still a HUGE resource. They managed to digitize and index a ridiculous number of obscure books, particularly from the 1800s and early 1900s. (There's earlier stuff too, but it's not as comprehensive or indexed as well, largely due to issues in recognizing old fonts and letter variants.)
For anyone interested in any kind of historical information, this is a goldmine unlike anything ever available in the history of humanity, even the Library of Alexandria. You want to know when or how some concept emerged in the 1800s or early 1900s? You can do a full text search of thousands of obscure books and pinpoint exactly how an idea emerged, was first discussed, and then spread. Heck, I've even made use of it to find when and how certain kinds of foods emerged, or when kitchen equipment became standardized.
A decade ago this kind of research required hours or days in one of the few libraries with large and comprehensive collections of old books. Now, I can usually get at least a rough answer to even incredibly obscure historical questions within a few minutes and a couple tailored searches.
That in itself is nothing short of an amazing accomplishment. Add all of the old resources that are still valuable -- we used to depend on Dover Edition reprints of old classic textbooks or standard classic works of both non-fiction and fiction. Now you can download almost any major book you want from before 1920 or so as a searchable PDF for free. You want a classic old textbook on math or Latin or mechanics or whatever? There are literally hundreds of them available, thanks to digitization brought to you by Google Books.
And then there are all the newer books -- I agree that there are lots of annoying books with no preview, but Google Books was the first place to bring you a full-text search to so many recent books, often with a preview of a few pages.
Again, for someone doing research on just about anything, this was absolutely amazing when I first began using it a lot 5-6 years ago. A decade ago, I'd need to go to the library and find a book, then scan through the index or page through it to see if it had relevant information. Half of the time now I can just do a full-text search on thousands of related books on the topic and often get a preview of the relevant pages instantly in one place.
The real unfortunate problem, to my mind, is the "abandoned" works on Google Books, books that aren't old enough to be in the public domain, but for which there's no clear rights holder available or easy to contact. The are huge numbers of great resources from the 1920s up to the present day which I can only get a "snippet view" of, if that. That's also a HUGE hole, but it doesn't detract from the achievement of what Google Books has done.
Just as one other random anecdote -- I first realized the true power of Google Books about 5 years ago. Part of my research touches on history of science, and I was working through some odd calculations in a 17th-century treatise. I was briefly
Google Books was and is the best thing ever to happen to some academic fields. People who study 16th through 18th century literature now have access to stuff in their offices that used to require hunting through libraries in Europe. I'm a historian and use Google Books extensively to at least locate sources -- sometimes I need to e-mail a library in Europe to get a better quality scan, but Google Books and HathiTrust, the non-profit consortium of libraries and universities that partnered with Google usually have exactly what I need. Last summer they digitized a book I needed -- there were four copies in all of Europe, period, and none in the US. Now I have the PDF, and it's always on Hathi/Google.