SIVACRACY.NET

Read the NYT's 12/21/04 editorial entitledThe Electronic Library and see if it makes as little sense to you as it does to me. Below are some Annotated (get it?) excerpts:

"Last week, Google announced an ambitious new plan to start converting millions of books into digital files in partnership with several major libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. This is a logical step for Google, which says its mission "is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Google's mission, especially now that it is a publicly traded company, is by definition to make money for its shareholders, so one might assume they mean "universally accessible and useful to the universe of people who can afford the fees or are willing to submit to the monitoring and advertising." I hope that public libraries and university libraries will not be lured by the promise of revenue streams, but they very well may be. What kinds of bargains libraries have struck with Google, and what these arrangements might ultimately mean for patrons, concerns me greatly, though apparently not the NYT.

"The library is the heart of every university, and one of the basic tasks a university performs is to preserve books and control access to them. No matter how liberally a university chooses to define "access," its books are restricted by geography at the very least. Google wants to make the books it scans freely available in searchable, full-text forms to anyone, anywhere, with an Internet connection. It will also provide information for finding the nearest copy of the real physical book.".....

To paraphrase Richard Stallman, there is a difference between free speech and free beer. When Google says "freely available" I'd like to know what the company means. Surely Google will get paid somehow.

".... But there are some serious concerns. One is about copyright. At the outset, this project will be limited to books that are old enough to no longer be under copyright. This is as it should be. It will serve as a demonstration of the immensity - and the immense cultural value - of works in the public domain, and could well kindle a new appreciation of the significance of the public domain."

This is not at all as it should be. The idea that libraries will start differentiating between books containing materials in the public domain, and books containing copyrighted materials, is very worrisome. And while there are many books in the public domain, the impact of distingushing between books based on copyright status will be felt much more powerfully by some users than by others. Those who study history and literature will have a lot of public domain material to work with, but would you want to be treated by a medical doctor who had access only to written resources published before 1923? How many computer science books are likely to be in this collection?

"Beginning with older books will also give Google, the libraries and book publishers time to sort out the problem of creating a comprehensive digital library of books that are currently under copyright. As always in negotiations over intellectual property, the trick will be to balance public utility, corporate profits and the welfare of writers, scholars and editors, and to do so, if possible, without the intervention of Congress."

These tensions pre-dated the Google announcement by years. If you are interested in a "freely accessible" scholarly account of these very issues, written by me, click here. Unlike the NYT, I actually favor Congressional intervention, because an unfettered "free" market is likely to be quite hostile to the mission of nonprofit libraries.