Open Access News

It’s odd to hear Vinton Cerf, regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Internet, to gush over ink-on-paper books. The electronic pioneer and computer scientist, who now works as Google’s chief Internet evangelist, is also a bibliophile...These days, Cerf is busy promoting Google’s plan to marry his two passions -- books and the Internet -- by digitizing millions of library books. He recently dropped by my office to explain the controversial plan and talk about its implications for book lovers.

As Cerf talked about his personal book collection and the limitations of having knowledge fixed on paper, he got me thinking about how reading will be transformed when static libraries join the more dynamic world of cross-referenced knowledge on the Web...."Think for a moment about the dead-tree problem," he said. "When you stand in your own personal library looking for something and you realize that A, you can’t remember which book it was in, and B, there’s no way you can go through manually looking at all the pages, then you think, ’God, I wish all this stuff was online.’ "...

Google is not alone in trying to digitize library books. Yahoo, Microsoft and other Internet players have joined a collaborative effort called the Open Content Alliance, which is planning to digitize not only library books but other types of multimedia, as well, making them all accessible on the Web....

Cerf thinks [the five] publishers [suing Google] fail to appreciate that Google probably will help them sell more books by making them searchable. Helping people locate a book and know what’s in it, he said, are key steps toward getting them to buy it. And for many books are available for sale, Google provides links to Amazon.com and other online sellers. Google does not sell books.

For now, Google is showing no ads alongside search results involving books from libraries, only books provided by publishers. In those cases, publishers are receiving a share of the ad revenue. Google also recently announced it will soon allow publishers and copyright holders to sell full electronic access to books through Google book search, either by letting people read the text online or downloading copies. Google will take a 30 percent commission on any fees publishers collect.

What Google has not announced, but is likely to one day, are ways it might help publishers and authors enhance pages from printed books once they are online. Cerf refers to this as "books that talk to each other," an idea to make them more like the rest of the Web where pages are cross-linked and visitors can annotate and tag text as is done with Web logs. "Because the Internet is a computing environment, a software environment, it’s possible to create a much richer kind of information than what we are typically accustomed to in books," Cerf said. Digitized books, he said, can be searched and updated easily, linked to related material, and enhanced with audio and video. But they can also be changed, which means that the book you read a year ago may look different the next time you consult it.