More Google Print

The folks at Boingboing recently posted about the whole legal flap between Google and the Author's Guild over the Google Print project. Published authors themselves, they have some of the best refutations for those who have raised reasonable objections concerning copyright and the ethics of intellectual property in the digital age.

(They were also less than pleased to find themselves named as co-litigants in the Author's Guild class action suit.)

I've been thinking about the whole issue again and again, wondering what could possibly motivate authors to reduce their profile by insisting that Google not make works they've written searchable by keyword. I can almost understand the theoretical objections of a best-selling author, but even if Google Print isn't adding to sales it certainly isn't hurting them either (whereas less-known authors stand to reap enormous potential benefits from turning up in someone's search results). The bugaboo of a Napster-like ebook trade spawned by Google's scanning efforts seems a little far-fetched given the enormous restrictions placed on viewing copyrighted material -- it's sort of like arguing that someone might put circulate a bootleg version of a feature-length film by patching together movie previews. Thus far Google has only scanned books not with the intention of resale or redistribution but for the purpose of indexing the information therein.

So what gives? Is it some kind of technophobic snobbishness, similar to Jonathan Franzen's disparagement of having the Oprah's Book Club logo on the cover of his acclaimed novel The Corrections, even though such an endorsement lead to millions of extra copies being sold? Although I wouldn't put such a sentiment past certain authors, I think the real reason why Google Print is in the crosshairs right now can be summed up in two words: EEBO and ECCO. The former is Early English Books Online, the latter Eighteenth Century Collections Online -- both are immensely popular databases offered by publishing titan Chadwyck-Healey to libraries and other educational institutions for what amounts to a king's ransom (or two if you subscribe to both). EEBO consists of virtually every extant English text printed between the mid-15th century and 1700, whereas ECCO continues this comprehensive online collection up to 1800 with full page scans of the items in question and keyword search functionality for the majority of authors.

Though all of the component works in these databases have long since passed out of copyright, this doesn't stop the publisher from making a killing on providing access to these digital treasures. Just imagine, I'm sure someone said in a boardroom somewhere, what we could charge for fulltext access to books that are within copyright. Just as music distributors are now bundling their artists to make them browsable online (for a modest subscription fee), the publishers were almost certainly preparing themselves for a similar digital future -- only libraries being accustomed to paying hand over fist for electronic resources that their faculty, students, and staff increasingly cannot function without, they must have been imagining a bonanza of licensing and subscription revenue. And then came Google Print to crash the party. Not only did this new project threaten the publishers' future returns on offering fulltext indexing for a price, but it also retroactively encroached upon EEBO and ECCO's hold on the captive library markets by offering a potentially free alternative to view items no longer protected by copyright. If Google can digitize the same texts and make them available for free to anyone with an internet connection, who will pay Chadwyck-Healy half a million dollars to own the "name brand" databases?

The content providers of old have no choice to fight, but ultimately it's a losing battle. Although often dubbed "the next Microsoft," Google doesn't have so much as a fraction of the arrogance that characterized the House That Gates Built. They listen and they learn. Consider its dealings with the European Union: fearful that Google's scanning project would effectively ghettoize non-English authors and works online, earlier this year the 19 national libraries of the EU signed a joint declaration to come up with a competitive digital alternative for the literature of Europe. Instead of responding with defensiveness or hostility, the folks at Google this month reached out to those same nations, asking them to contribute non-English materials to the mass digitization effort.

Make no mistake about it -- Google is at the end of the day a for-profit company, and even if their corporate motto is "Don't Be Evil" that doesn't mean the entire world should simply that them at their word and surrender every last bit of skepticism in the name of progress. But let's not lose sight of the fact that despite having myriad opportunities to turn their overwhelming market share into a tool for bullying the little guy, Google has instead empowered little guys everywhere, from small-circulation authors to one-man internet sales ventures. If trust is something that is earned, the folks at Google have a lot of it to squander before I start worrying about their good intentions. So even as an aspiring author myself, I am inclined to give Google Print the benefit of the doubt. So, too, should everyone else.