Google Library Project: Are We There Yet?

With news that Google is directly challenging Windows with its own operating system (Chrome, available in 2010) we ask the question: what ever happened to The Google Library Initiative? It began in December 2004, and seemed to generate steam — but what happened?

The Google Library Project's aim was simple: make it easier for people to find relevant books, specifically, books they wouldn't find any other way such as those that are out of print — while carefully respecting authors' and publishers' copyrights.

The ultimate goal was to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers.

Under the Library Project, Google planned to scan into its search database materials from the libraries of major colleges and universities, convert to text using optical character recognition, and store in its digital database. When relevant to a user's keyword search, up to three results from the Google Book Search index would be displayed above search results in the Google Web Search service. A user may also search just for books at the dedicated Google Book Search service. Clicking a result from Google Book Search opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book as well as content-related advertisements and links to the publisher's website and booksellers. Through a variety of access limitations and security measures, some based on user-tracking, Google limits the number of viewable pages and attempts to prevent page printing and text copying of material under copyright.

Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and others signed up. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries were the eighth collegiate partner to join the Initiative. Since, there have been an ever-growing number of libraries working with Google as part of this project: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/partners.html. And Google concurrently began conducting a pilot project with the Library of Congress.
But then came the lawsuits: While the initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge, it has too been criticized for potentially serious copyright violations and nebulous public-domain licensing issues.

The basic allegation by the Authors' Guild was Google Print violates copyright law by infringing on an author's exclusive right to reproduction, distribution, and display of his works. Google countered that its project represented a fair use and is the digital age equivalent of a card catalog with every word in the publication indexed.

The publishing industry and writers' groups soon criticized the project's inclusion of snippets of copyrighted works as infringement. In June 2006, a French publisher announced its intention to sue Google France. In March 2007, Thomas Rubin, associate general counsel for copyright, trademark, and trade secrets at Microsoft, accused Google of violating copyright law with this service. Rubin specifically criticized Google's policy of freely copying any work until notified by the copyright holder to stop. Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia has argued that the project poses a danger for the doctrine of fair use, because the fair use claims are arguably so excessive that it may cause judicial limitation of that right.

And while the Author's Guild v. Google never went to court, the Guild, the publishing industry and Google entered into a settlement agreement October 28, 2008, with Google agreeing to pay a total of $125 million to rights holders of books they had scanned, to cover the plaintiff's court costs, and to create a Book Rights Registry. Reaction to the settlement was mixed, and Harvard Library, one of the original contributing libraries to Google Library, withdrew its partnership if "more reasonable terms" cannot be found.
According to Reuters, in a June 24 article, the Google initiative is really a monopoly in sheep's clothing and the meme of a monopoly has been gathering steam over the last several months.

Robert Darnton, the head of Harvard's library system, was originally one of the most prominent backers of Google's digitization idea, but somewhere along the line, Darnton changed course. In February, he wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books in which he set out the case that thanks to Google Book Search, Google will enjoy "a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information." Since Darnton's essay appeared, the anti-Google crusade has gathered steam, fed by Google-bashing advocacy groups like Consumer Watchdog, and the hue and cry has sparked a federal antitrust inquiry.

Darnton, as well as critics such as top literary agent Lynn Chu and the group Consumer Watchdog, espouse that the Book Search will rip off writers and publishers and worse, charge too much and give authors and publishers too little.

And despite Google taking measures to provide full text of only works in public domain, and providing only a searchable summary online for books still under copyright protection, publishers maintain that Google has no right to copy full text of books with copyrights and save them, in large amounts, into its own database.

In his March 9, 2009 editorial ("Google and the Future of Books"), Darnton argued the failure to establish an independent, non-corporate library as a big missed opportunity. A Google library, he said, represents an enterprise so huge and concentrated that it would literally control access to information.

Darnton wrote, "The eighteenth-century philosophers saw monopoly as a main obstacle to the diffusion of knowledge—not merely monopolies in general, which stifled trade according to Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, but specific monopolies such as the Stationers' Company in London and the booksellers' guild in Paris, which choked off free trade in books."

Darnton lamented the fact that Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books in 2008, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google.

The Big Money's Mark Gimein attempted to debunk these myths: Will Google force writers and publishers into an unfair deal? Gimein says copyright holders have "63 percent of the revenue that Google takes in from their books. Very few authors and publishers might individually strike better deals than this one, and nothing in Google's agreement keeps them from doing that."
Will Google raise the price of online content and make it inaccessible? Gimein says "Everything we know about Google indicates a clear preference for one price point: free."

Will the public be better served by a nonprofit database that guarantees access to books at "reasonable" rates? Gimein points out that in practice, there is no assurance that what a hypothetical independent authority "would count as a reasonable price would be better than the price that Google is likely to charge."

Will writers or publishers who let Book Search scan their books give up the right to control how they are presented and sold forever? Even after Google has scanned their books, "rights holders can at any time exclude them from Google's services."
"They can allow Google to display the whole book, excerpts, or nothing at all. The only right they lose if they accept the agreement that Google signed last year with associations of publishers and authors is the right to sue Google for copyright violations simply for adding their books to its electronic files," says Gimein.

Gimein sums up: "The bottom line on Book Search is that if you want to construct doomsday scenarios about how Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin will partner with Dr. Evil to suddenly shut off our access to hundreds of years of knowledge, you can. But nothing we know about Google or about the book business gives us any indication we should expect that. A more likely scenario is that Google will give away so much of its content for free that, even after giving them 63 percent of its revenue, it may well return too little to writers and publishers. That would still leave the creators of the millions of out-of-print books that Google is scanning more than they get from their work now (zero!), but it would mean that eventually many will desert for better options."

The Google Book Search service remains in a beta stage and the underlying database continues to grow, but so do the questions. By March 2007, Google had digitized one million books, according to The New York Times at an estimated cost of $5 million. On October 28, 2008, Google stated that they had 7 million books searchable through Google Book Search, including those scanned by their 20,000 publisher partners. Of the 7 million books, 1 million are "full preview" based on agreements with publishers. One million are in the public domain.
In May 2009, at the annual BookExpo convention in New York, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google.

And since the Author's Guild v. Google suit did not go to court, the fair use issue remains unresolved.
Still, Google has been doing its due diligence. As part of the 2008 settlement, Google created a Google Book Settlement web site that went active on February 11, 2009. The site allows authors and other rights holders of out of print (but copyright) books to submit a claim by January 5, 2010. In return they will receive $60 per full book, or $5 to $15 for partial works. In return, Google will be able to index the books and display snippets in search results, as well as up to 20% of each book in preview mode. Google will also be able to show ads on these pages and make available for sale digital versions of each book. Authors and copyright holders will receive 63 percent of all advertising and e-commerce revenues associated with their works.

And Google's licensing of public domain works is also an area of concern as Google is claiming a restrictive 'No-Commercial use' term in respect of the PDF electronic versions it provides, as well as using digital watermarking techniques with them. Some published works that are in the public domain, such as all works created by the U.S. Federal government, are still treated like other works under copyright, and therefore locked after 1922.

According to a member of the Google Book Search Support Team, "Since whether a book is in the public domain can often be a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain." Google continues to scan books and magazine despite the ethical questions raised by many.

By Gabe Geltzer