For those of us who are still consumers of those bundles of printed content known as books, the importance of today’s news of Google’s library deal is almost impossible to overstate. It’s just huge.
While the Web has represented an enormous leap in the availability of human knowledge and the ease of human communication, its status as a sort of modern-day Library of Alexandria has remained suspect as long as nearly the entire corpus of human knowledge pre-Web remained locked away off-line between bound covers. “All human knowledge except what’s in books” is sort of like saying “All human music except what’s in scores.” There’s lots of good stuff there, but not the heart of things. Your Library of Alexandria is sort of a joke without, you know, the books.
Now Google, in partnership with some of the world’s leading university libraries (including Stanford and Harvard), is undertaking the vast — but not, as Brewster Kahle reminded us at Web 2.0, limitless — project of scanning, digitizing and rendering searchable the world of books.
Google’s leaders are demonstrating that their corporate mission statement — “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — is not just empty words. If you’re serious about organizing the world’s information, you’d better have a plan for dealing with the legacy matter of the human species’ nearly three millennia of written material. So, simply, bravo for the ambition and know-how of a company that’s willing to say, “Sure, we can do it.”
Amazon’s “look inside the book” feature provides a limited subset of this sort of data. But where Amazon has seemed mostly interested in providing limited “browsability” as a marketing tool, Google has its eye on the more universal picture. And so the first books that will be fully searchable and readable through this new project are books that are old enough to be out of copyright. The public domain just got a lot more public. (And presumably, as John Battelle suggests, we’ll see a new business ecosystem spring up around providing print-on-demand physical copies of these newly digitized, previously unavailable public-domain texts.)
This is all such a Good Thing for the public itself that we may be inclined to overlook some of the more troubling aspects of the Google project. Google is making clear that, as it digitizes the holdings of university libraries, it’s handing the universities their own copies of the data, to do with as they please. But apparently the Google copies of this information will be made widely available in an advertising-supported model.
For the moment, that seems fine: Google’s approach to advertising is the least intrusive and most user-respectful you can find online today; if anyone can make advertising attractive and desirable, Google can.
But Google is a public company. The people leading it today will not be leading it forever. It’s not inconceivable that in some future downturn Google will find itself under pressure to “monetize” its trove of books more ruthlessly.
Today’s Google represents an extremely benign face of capitalism, and it may be that the only way to get a project of this magnitude done efficiently is in the private sector. But capitalism has its own dynamic, and ad-supported businesses tend to move in one direction — towards more and more aggressive advertising.
Since we are, after all, talking about digitizing the entire body of published human knowledge, I can’t help thinking that a public-sector effort — whether government-backed or non-profit or both — is more likely to serve the long-term public good. I know that’s an unfashionable position in this market-driven era. It’s also an unrealistic one given the current U.S. government’s priorities.
But public investment has a pretty enviable track record: Think of the public goods that Americans enjoy today because the government chose to seed them and insure their universality — from the still-essential Social Security program to the interstate highway system to the Internet itself. In an ideal world, it seems to me, Google would be a technology contractor for an institution like the Library of Congress. I’d rather see the company that builds the tools of access to information be an enabler of universal access than a gatekeeper or toll-taker.
The public has a big interest in making sure that no one business has a chokehold on the flow of human knowledge. As long as Google’s amazing project puts more knowledge in more hands and heads, who could object? But in this area, taking the long view is not just smart — it’s ethically essential. So as details of Google’s project emerge, it will be important not just to rely on Google’s assurances but to keep an eye out for public guarantees of access, freedom of expression and limits to censorship.
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.