Of drainpipes and sandbags

The Information Drainpipe got somewhat clogged earlier in the month when the Association of American Publishers effectively forced Google to declare a six-month moratorium on its digitization of copyrighted books as part of the Google Print Library Project. If you'll recall I was singing Google Print's praises just before leaving for vacation and was extremely disappointed to hear that their work had been temporarily stymied, as publishers cling to a medieval concept of intellectual property amidst a technological sea-change that will quite frankly benefit all content producers in the long run as their publications become increasingly searchable (and ipso facto more in demand) by not just scholars but the general public as well.

I guess no one has informed them of the so-called Long Tail, a statistical phenomenon whereby the more offerings you have out there and available, the more that your low-demand items -- such as scholarly monographs -- make up the preponderance of your total sales volume. This of course runs contrary to the conventional wisdom of brick-and-mortar operations, but when applied to such virtual businesses as Amazon where storage costs are almost infinitesimally low, the Long Tail manifests itself. In this paradigm publishers do not benefit from locking their content away like Carolingian monks (who literally chained their books to the monastery's library carrels), but spur demand simply by allowing services such as Google Print or Amazon's Search Inside the Book to index it.

After all, neither company is giving anything away, save for what is already permitted by the doctrine of Fair Use under U.S. Copyright Law -- and even then both Google and Amazon have hewed to a much stricter interpretation of Fair Use than, say, libraries, by making only a few consecutive pages of a book available in one's search results and not a chapter or article at a time as most interpretations of the law allow for such services as Interlibrary Loan. And both Amazon and Google are facilitating the purchase of the books they scan, by offering quick links to buy the items being searched -- the former does so for obvious reasons, but Google Print was under no obligation to do the same, especially if their intentions were as sinister as the APA makes them out to be.

I know it's becoming fashionable in many circles to bash Google -- in the library establishment there are many who are ideologically opposed to what Google represents, including the current president of the American Library Association, who has gotten himself into row after row with his fellow librarians concerning not only Google's usefulness but the value of blogs. The New York Times jumped on this bandwagon yesterday with a sandbagging that trolled for negative comments among the companies Google has rendered irrelevant or is in direct competition with for funding and talent for concepts that can only be charitably described as Google rip-offs.

The technorati desperately want to cast Google as the next Microsoft, the Borg of the 21st Century. But such a characterization is as of yet unwarranted by a company that continues to make its money and win market share by constantly innovating and giving away its products for free, as a dissenting voice on Buzzmachine's commentariat so rightly pointed out. Jeff Jarvis himself is trying to have his cake and eat it too by playing the Cassandra about Google's inevitable fall from grace even while he re-rigs his blog to carry Google Ads.

Insofar as Google has become virtually impossible for the average computer user to get by without, yes, it has achieved what Microsoft did in the 1990's. But it did so in a relatively benign fashion, following its own corporate motto "Don't Be Evil." Even as Google's recent boycott of CNET may call that ethical mantra into question somewhat, it's still a far cry from the ruthless business practices which helped cement other corporate monopolies. So don't go shorting that Google stock just yet!

(In light of Google Print's copyright woes, here's a timely link: a copyright flowchart from Bromberg & Sunstein LLP. An extremely useful bookmark for anyone in the library biz!)