Open Access News

May Google give the book publishing industry a collective ulcer. Mostly because the publishers are being so stinkin' dense. Google has provoked an orgy of angst over its two book-related projects. One is Google Print, Google's program to scan books — with the publishers' permission — and make a limited number of those copyright-protected pages available online. The other is the Google Print Library project, which went live last week. That's aimed at making all books in the world searchable online. Books in the public domain can be seen in their entirety online. But for copyrighted works, Google's Library project gives you only card catalog-like information and a couple of sentences of text — nothing more. The misinformation and misguided attempts to stop these projects are mind-blowing. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) have sued to shut them down. Writers have been pounding out angry op-ed pieces. Writing in USA TODAY on Monday, AAP President and former congresswoman Pat Schroeder got the Google Library project wrong. She wrote that Google's Library project should ask permission "before they scan and make available our work to the world for free." But Google Library isn't doing that. The publishing industry seems to understand the Google projects as well as Homer Simpson understands how a nuclear reactor works. That hit its nadir on Monday, when a weepy story surfaced that the Great Ormond Street children's hospital in the U.K. might be endangered by Google Print because the hospital is funded by royalties from sales of Peter Pan, which author J.M. Barrie bequeathed to the institution in the 1920s. I'm waiting for the New York Post headline: "Google sinks sick kids!"

The idea that Google Print or Google Library threatens book sales doesn't ring true — especially because Google Print is almost an exact duplicate of Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book" feature, which has been a way to help Amazon sell books. Google Print works like this: You type in words you're looking for and get back a list of matches from books. Click on one you want to see, and you get a full-screen image of that page in the book. From there, you can click to see two pages before or after the original page, but then you're cut off. If you want to read more, you have to search again and go through the same process. You can't even print the pages or copy the text and paste it elsewhere. There's no easy way to read a whole copyrighted book for free on either Google or Amazon. This isn't like music on Kazaa, with perfect free copies flying around the Internet. This is a clever technological middle ground between the utopia of free access to the world's best libraries and the hard fact that authors must be paid or they'll stop writing books. Yes, Google Library is scanning books from libraries without first seeking publishers' or authors' permission. But Google is only making the text searchable, so you can find whether what you're researching is in a book somewhere. At that point, you'd have to buy a physical book or go to a library to see the information. By exposing books this way, Google will most likely help publishers and authors make more money from their work....I'm the author of two books, and I want mine online. I'm all for having someone who's doing a research project land on a page from one of my books and decide it looks interesting enough to want to buy the whole thing....If programs such as Google Print and Google Library can keep long-form written communication relevant, authors and book publishers will be better off. The pages and card catalog info can only make people aware of books, not steal sales from them.