If Google really believes in its’ utopean ideal rhetoric, then I’m sure it wouldn’t mind providing for every liblary and every school and every competing search-engine free API’s and White-labelled versions of this new Alexandria that it wishes to build for All mankinds benefit – without adsense!

The reality is that people haven’t caught up with the fact that google isn’t just run by 2 guys anymore, but is a public compny controlled by professional money-makers.

The bright-sparks and clever-clogs remain and follow because of google’s history, whereas in time it won’t have the same vision that a company like Apple does or the professionalism (relative to being in touch with users) that yahoo does.

Finally, when was the last time google actually done something new, rather than google-ising ebay, aim, pricerunner, skype, hotmail, map-quest, et al.

It’s also always made clear it wants adverts at every think-point at every potential sale, combined with the vision of the internet ,from the begining, as a universally accessed virtual desktop (enter choice of company slogan).

The sad thing is that those six letters are now hardwired in my fingers and mind, so it will be a while before any real change. Fear is the best thing to make a company be good, and google isn’t afraid that it’s going to disappear any time soon.

More importantly, such loss of revenue has a precedent in the print world. For many years publishers have released a hardcover library binding edition of their paperback books. Also for many years, libraries have refused to pay exorbitant prices for those library editions by buying the paperback and rebinding it for less. The publisher loses income in this conversion, but that doesn’t make it illegal. What’s the difference if a library converts a printed book into an electronic file? Yes, the publisher misses out on income, but I don’t see much difference here.

One difference might be that, by scanning a book, the library suddenly has two copies when it only bought one: the print plus the electronic copy, when it only bought one. The library could toss the printed copy to solve this problem. But I favor publishers just letting libraries serve patrons in the way most convenient for them.

In any case, this is unlikely to be a problem any time soon for one simple reason: no library will make an electronic copy unless it can guarantee that the reader can’t copy it; without such guarantees libraries would be exposed to lawsuits from copyright holders. To prevent this, libraries either have to have digital rights management tools that they don’t currently possess, or they have to display only on one screen at a time on a computer in the library, making use of the electronic versions extremely cumbersome, and likely unpopular.

In short, publishers’ worries are misplaced. Publishers are facing unprecedented competition and change through the Internet. But Google is not a threat. Targeting the company means the reader loses while publishers little to nothing.

Just because the American Association of Publishers and others might be able to succeed at stopping Google doesn’t mean they should. That would be a travesty, the modern day equivalent of burning down the library at Alexandria before it gets built.

Greg Bates is the Publisher at Common Courage Press and writing a book, “Book Ends: How The Birth and Death of the Printed Book Changed the World, 1510 and 2010″ His blog is at http://eiomojo.blogspot.com/

I come from an academic community of music information retrieval researchers (ranking, clustering, organizing etc. by content-based musical similarity). We organized the first conference in this field in 2000 (ISMIR), and since 2002, almost four years now, many of us have been trying to get Google interested in doing music search, even personally meeting with some top brass.

The answer each of one us gets, every time we talk to Google is this: “Google does not do music IR because of Intellectual Property issues”.

However, time and again, we have pointed out to Google that IP is not an issue, for exactly the same reasons Google is now saying their library digitization project is not an issue. Suppose Google went to a college library, let’s say Indiana University because their music collection is vast, and digitized that library’s music collections. Suppose they then allowed users to “query by example” on that collection, and find music that was similar to songs they already liked. Suppose Google never actually let users hear more than 5% of the song (i.e. a couple of “paragraphs”). If you never actually serve up the song itself, but only serve up a link to the song in an online store, no one’s rights will be violated. But, even after we explained this to Google, their reaction was still: “No, we cannot. We fear intellectual property issues.”

It seems to me that this disingenuous. If you know it’s “evil” to do this for music, why do you thing it’s “good” to do this for books? Are not both equally protected by intellectual property rights?

Let’s recast some of Google’s CEO’s words, from above:

“How many users will find, and then buy, [music] they never could have discovered any other way? How many out-of-print and backlist [songs] will find new and renewed sales life? How many future [composers and performers] will make a living through their [notes and lyrics] solely because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered audience to find them?”

And yet, Google repeatedly refuses to do music, for intellectual property reasons? Agree or disagree with Google about their justifications for Google Print. But realize that they don’t really believe the reasons they’re giving us. If Google hasn’t gotten into music because of limited resources or limited expertise, that would be one thing. But time and again, they have explicitly claimed to me and my colleagues that it is because of intellectual property, not limited resources or lack of interest. It is with that understanding that I sometimes now shake my head in disbelief when I hear them talk about Google Print.

This is what public libraries do. And a good many of them do it online without requiring a password. For free.

Libraries are a public good funded by public money and do not benefit from enabling the search. Google can do it better, but the reason they do it is to make money from it, through branding and increased usage of their other services.

The critical difference is that Google is doing it, and profiting from it, without permission from all authors.

As for it being possible to reconstruct the entire book from Google results I don’t think any but the most desperately poor or terminally tightwad would take time to do that–it’s a tiny percentage of the market who would probably borrow the book from a public library anyway and never actually buy it.

This is a negligible loss comparable to the leakage of content that occurs in book reviews or film trailers.

If all search does it to serve up a pointer to the content, then everything is fine. Users who think that the content may solve their problem will follow the pointer (whether a link to a website or instructions to buy a book, or any other type of pointer). Once the user arrives at the destination, it’s the author’s/publisher’s problem to figure out how to make money from their content, whether by charging for it or thorugh other means. They should be grateful for the search engine for driving traffic their way.

Again, there’s only a problem if it’s not necessary to follow a pointer, because the answer can be had through information published on the search engine’s own site. Under this scenatio, the search engine becomes a new publisher of the author’s content and should provide payment, just as is the case when, for example, a book is published in a translation.

(Of course some authors want to publish for free, in return for PR value or such, but then they would probably have put their content on their website and not in a book. So we should assume that anybody who publishes commercially want to be paid for their work, particularly from somebody who makes loads of money by republishing it.)

I disagree. Surfacing books and the knowledge they represent is a major addition to society, and I for one have no issues with them getting paid for it.

People will go to Google to find the print search, then use their other services because of the positive branding brought about by this “altruistic” effort. This is the reality of the web – make your site a destination site with free content so you can make money on advertising and other services. Having Print be a separate section of the site doesn’t divorce it from Google’s for-profit activities. How could net-savvy folks be fooled by this?

Copyright laws allow for fair use for general education, including comment and criticism. Google is adding nothing to general understanding of the material they scan, but merely providing a searchable index. The fair use clause is an EXCEPTION to the rule – Google is making money from offering Google print and is violating the intent of the law.

Eric’s argument is self-serving, and is obfuscating the real value to Google they are creating with this effort. Don’t buy into this obfuscating argument – the plain fact is that they are doing this to increase their branding, to increase their traffic and so increase their profits.

Jim Gerber
Google Inc.
Content Partnerships Director