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Invoking the name of Google is enough to spook most media businesses grappling with the impact of the Internet, but the search giant's foray into the realm of books has created a firestorm. The book-publishing industry's portrayal of Google conjures up images of Guy Montag, the "hero" of Ray Bradbury's 1950s book-burning masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, gleefully destroying works of literature.
The row is a classic clash between the old and the new; between an industry that can trace its roots back to Johannes Gutenberg and other printers of the 15th century and one that has erupted in just half a decade.
Pessimists in the printed world have drawn parallels between Google's digitization of books and the ending of Britain's net book agreement in the early 1990s. But just as relaxing restrictions on how books are priced led to a renaissance in reading, as booksellers launched marketing ploys such as "three for two" offers, Google's attempt to free the knowledge locked in pen and ink could be a revolution for the better.
Google's Book Search programme has two sides. It has co-opted thousands of publishers into its partner programme, which gives Google's millions of users a chance to discover and then buy books, but it is Google's library project that has infuriated those same publishers.
The fire was lit over a year ago when Google announced plans to work with five libraries the New York public library, the Bodleian in Oxford and the libraries of Stanford, Harvard and the University of Michigan to digitize their books as part of its Print Library project, and make the information gleaned accessible within its online search engine through Google Book Search, already available in test form.
The publishing industry raised the alarm, claiming the process infringed its most valuable asset, copyright. Nigel Newton, chief executive of Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter series, tore into Google, labelling the search engine's plans as "literary predation." In a speech to mark World Book Day this year, he added that copyright laws were being flouted to provide "window-dressing for a search engine."
Injunction
The French publisher La Martinire and Germany's WBG took legal action against Google, though the latter's request for an injunction was thrown out by a Hamburg court last week. In the US, there are two lawsuits pending. "This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," said Nick Taylor, president of one of the US plaintiffs, the Authors Guild, last September. "It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors the rightful owners of these copyrights to decide whether and how their works will be copied."
Five US publishers the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons launched a separate action on behalf of the Association of American Publishers. Its president, Patricia Schroeder, said: "The bottom line is that under its current plan Google is seeking to make millions of dollars by freeloading on the talent and property of authors and publishers."
Google, however, feels its intentions have been misrepresented by a publishing industry that is desperately trying to come to terms with the Web. Jans Redmer, director of Google Book Search Europe, said: "Google Book Search is about tapping into an incredible amount of offline content. It's not about putting whole books online; it's not about online reading; it's about book discovery. Ultimately, what we are trying to do is provide links to books in every single Google search request."
While books that are out of copyright are fully searchable, if a search request brings back information from a book under copyright, access is restricted. Users in the US, which has a "fair use" approach to copyright, get bibliographic data plus a few short sentences or "snippets" related to the search term. European users, however, get no more than the title of the book and its author.
The problem is that to compile the index Google uses for its search engine, it has to scan the entire book. Publishers claim this infringes copyright and want Google to ask permission for each book. The trouble is that only 20 per cent or so of books are in print and because many titles are "orphaned" when publishers go out of business, finding out who to ask for permission could take years.
Jigsaw
Extending this concept to the internet would mean search engines having to ask permission of the owner of a website before it could be included in an index, making search engines the "atlases" of the internet impossible to create.
Behind the attacks on Google's library scheme seems to be the fear that once it has copied a book, it can do whatever it likes with it. But Redmer stresses that Google does not intend to undermine publishing. "We don't want to tell the publishing industry how to run their businesses; all we want to do is help them shape their own future. We can be a small puzzle piece of a much larger jigsaw." That "piece" is Google's partner programme and the five US publishers suing the company are all involved. Launched in 2004 in the US and in Europe the next year, it digitizes books in the same way as the library project and they become part of search results.
(C) 2006 China Daily. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
