A Library to Last Forever
Published: October 8, 2009
Mountain View, Calif.
“THE fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the
popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to
properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of
the electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to
own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging
and boosting stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and
utility produced popular impressions which still exist.”
This
quotation would hardly surprise anyone who follows electric vehicles.
But it may be surprising to hear that in the year when it was written
thousands of electric cars were produced and that year was nearly a
century ago. This appeared in a 1916 issue of the journal Electrical
World, which I found in Google Books, our searchable repository of
millions of books. It may seem strange to look back a hundred years on
a topic that is so contemporary, yet I often find that the past has
valuable lessons for the future. In this case, I was lucky — electric
vehicles were studied and written about extensively early in the 20th
century, and there are many books on the subject from which to choose.
Because books published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able
to view them easily.
But the vast majority of books ever
written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious
researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923
quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one
can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print.
After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and
used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten,
authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible
to track down.
Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books
are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other
disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed
tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon
— a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could
read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report,
published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.
Because
books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge
and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first
proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a
fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and
challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on
it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google
Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of
books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.
The
next year we were sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of
American Publishers over the project. While we have had disagreements,
we have a common goal — to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous
number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights
holders. As a result, we were able to work together to devise a
settlement that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement
is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are
the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of
books.
There has been some debate about the settlement, and
many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. I would
like to take this opportunity to dispel some myths about the agreement
and to share why I am proud of this undertaking. This agreement aims to
make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either
for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue
flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.
Some
have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license
because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members
of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that
rights holders can at any time
set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from
Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not
yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are
assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have
not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders,
giving them an incentive to step forward.
Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition,
or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to
out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any
other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort.
The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as
much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to
access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to
one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find
it in the stacks.
I
wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at
such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have
spared Google a tremendous amount of effort. But despite a number of
important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund
others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a
comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the
requisite resources. At least one such service will have to exist if
there are ever to be one hundred.
If Google Books is successful,
others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement
creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to
come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to
obtain permissions. While new projects will not immediately have the
same rights to orphan works, the agreement will be a beacon of
compromise in case of a similar lawsuit, and it will serve as a
precedent for orphan works legislation, which Google has always
supported and will continue to support.
Last, there have been
objections to specific aspects of the Google Books product and the
future service as planned under the settlement, including questions
about the quality of bibliographic information, our choice of
classification system and the details of our privacy policy. These are
all valid questions, and being a company that obsesses over the quality
of our products, we are working hard to address them — improving
bibliographic information and categorization, and further detailing our
privacy policy. And if we don’t get our product right, then others
will. But one thing that is sure to halt any such progress is to have
no settlement at all.
In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which
I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction
of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a
record will “impress the necessity of something being
done” to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three
times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of
Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.
I
hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest
otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact
in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can
access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play
a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century.
Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step
toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this
opportunity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/opinion/09brin.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
