The Good Library Blog

The Google project doesn't mean the end of books, any more than the current problems with DRM and peer to peer downloading mean the end of music. What it does signal is the end of the road for the incumbent lazy middle-man business models of most publishers as they currently stand. Though I agree; librarians should be out in front working *with* Google to ensure that the public get the greatest advantage from the service. Playing King Canute and waving a fist at the advancing sea of technological change hasn't done the record companies any favours at all. If libraries and publishers stopped whingeing about change and tried swimming with the tide instead of against it, they'd do themselves - and us, the reading public - a huge service.

I have always been excited by the principles behind digitisation programmes such as Google Book Search - making historic texts freely available online so that they are available to everyone rather than the lucky few with access to deposit and academic libraries seems to me to be a welcome step in democratising culture. I have, however, had reservations as the availabilty of digitised texts has provided some libraries with a pretext for a further cull of their bookstacks. Sometimes just on the assumption that everything is available online now - when it isn't.

Organising a recent pub-reading of English Civil War poems has brought home to me just how often the web doesn't make what I'm looking for available online. This impression was reinforced when I started to search for the text to Andrew Marvell's short poem "The Mower to the Glow-worm" and discovered several books listed on Google Book Search that only included short extracts with links implying that the books hadn't been fully digitised because they were still in copyright and not yet in the public domain. They included 19th century books by the garden writer and friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne Henry Arthur Bright who died in 1884 - clearly now out of copyright.

Restricting access to publications which are in the public domain is a worrying development, effectively redefining copyright. It appears that Google book Search is operating on different principles to that of MSNs digitisation programme (Live Search)* which making full-text out of copyright works freely available. Many academic libraries already charge extortionate "reproduction fees" for illustratations that are in the public domain using their monopoly on supply to increase their income, to the detriment of small publishers - how long before they begin to use their privileged control over the text as another way of increasing their income?

It is vital that public libraries are not allowed to use digitisation programmes as an excuse for further cuts on their book stocks.

* (Live Search is at www.live.com - but its book digitisation programme is currently available in a beta version at present so it is necessary to search the site to find it - click on "web" - and it doesn't work when using a safari browser.)

I sent a comment on this but it seems to have been eaten!

I can't see anywhere that the 'end of books' is foretold, much less celebrated. Indeed the interviewee explicitly points up the ongoing popularity and value of the physical book.

Google aren't 'stealing copyright.' Rather they are making books available, for free, digitally- in the public domain books case. Ones not in the public domain are different again. Anyone else can make digi copies of these books, within the law etc.

The issue is with Google's control of the data, and many librarians have spoken about that.