On the Google Book Scanning Project and the Library We Will Never See (theatlantic.com)

For a decade, Google's enormous project to create a massive digital library of books was embroiled in litigation with a group of writers who say it was costing them a lot of money in lost revenue. Even as Google notched a victory when a federal appeals court ruled that the company's project was fair use, the company quietly shut down the project. From an article published in April this year: Despite eventually winning Authors Guild v. Google, and having the courts declare that displaying snippets of copyrighted books was fair use, the company all but shut down its scanning operation. It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It's like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It's there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages -- to do so, they've said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time -- and here we've done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it's 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they're the ones responsible for locking it up. But Google seems to be thinking ways to make use of it, it appears. Last month, it added a new feature to its search function that instantly connects you with eBook data from libraries near you. From a report: Now, every time you search for a book through Google, information about your local library rental options will be easily available. Yeah, that's right. Your local library not only still exists, but it has eBooks, which are things you can totally borrow (for free) online! Before, this perk was hidden somewhere deep within your local library's website -- assuming it had one -- but now these free literary wonders are all yours for the taking.

Comments

for free

[supernova87a]

Well, actually, isn't the problem that they want to sell it / use it for commercial purposes? If Google simply wanted to put this on the web for absolutely free, with no links to anything else, couldn't they?

I thought it's only when you're trying to sell something that these issues arise.

Re:for free

[Geoffrey.landis]

As an author, yes, I would like to be paid when my works are distributed.

The problem is that Google wanted to distribute the work from authors for free.

I do know that the idea that people should be paid for their work is controversial on /., where many commentators believe that information-- meaning other peoples' work-- should be free, and authors should be happy to starve, because, hey, it's exposure.

Well, actually, isn't the problem that they want to sell it / use it for commercial purposes? If Google simply wanted to put this on the web for absolutely free, with no links to anything else, couldn't they?

Google is the most valuable company in the world. They may want to distribute others peoples work for free, but they themselves plan to make a huge profit from doing so.

It's merely the authors who don't get paid.

Re:for free

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright length is the main issue, not a differing business model. There's a lot of content out there that the author's are dead and income are the least of their worries.

Re:for free

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You must be a goblin.

To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs

"But if it was bought —

then they would consider it rented by the one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. You saw Griphook's face when the tiara passed under his eyes. He disapproves. I believe he thinks, as do the fiercest of his kind, that it ought to have been returned to the goblins once the original purchaser died. They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft.

Re:for free

[careysub]

The key piece of this picture that no one (yet, in any of the comments posted thus far) as even mentioned that what we are talking about are books that are out of print. These are books that you cannot buy (unless you can find an old copy, and may be exorbitantly expensive if so), and make the author no money at all. Zero.

This is about 25 million books. Further it is estimated that half of these books are out of copyright under every iteration and perversion of copyright law and thus are already in the public domain - they belong to the public as is and was the intent of copyright law from the beginning.

And the Google-Author's Guild deal actually provided a way to provide some revenue to authors of out-of-print books. Nearly all books go out of print after several years, never, ever to even be printed again so nearly all authors face this issue.

So this is a lose-lose-lose situation (for Google, the public, and author's of out of print books).

That so many books can be in the public domain and yet be unavailable is largely the result of the constant expansion of copyright at the behest and for the benefit of corporations that own publishing rights that has plagued society throughout the Twentieth Century.

Why not campaign for better Copyright laws

[clickety6]

Hey Google, use some of that vast money stockpile to undo the damage that companies have been doing to Copyright laws. Get some reductions in copyright duration to something more reasonable (15 years!) and then you'll be able to release the vast majority of your scanned books.

Re:Dead [Re:for free]

[BronsCon]

I actually read that as "dead authors don't need to get paid, copyright shouldn't outlive the author". I suppose I could stretch it to imply that copyright should be more limited than that, as well; say, the 14 years it was originally. And remember, when copyright was 14 years, printing and distribution were much slower than what we're capable of today. A book that would have taken a year to go to press and be shipped across the globe can now arrive on everyone's shelf tomorrow; if anything, that should further shorten copyright terms.