Open Access News

The spat over the Google Print Library Project shows that Google needs to wise up, publishers need to wake up, and copyright needs a shake up. Indexing the world's books so that they are as searchable as web pages will be seen by our descendants as one of the great achievements of this generation. At last light will fall on the darkest recesses of the world's libraries, and wisdom that has been visible to almost no one will suddenly be only a click or two away from a large and growing proportion of humanity. But though the promise is sublime, the process by which it is being fulfilled verges on the ridiculous, and none of the main players is blameless....Start with Google, though it is perhaps the most blameless of all. Google has a logo that looks like it belongs in a toy store and a motto that says, "don't be evil", but it also has a $100 billion stock market capitalization and effectively controls access to a large and increasing proportion of human knowledge. Like Tom Hanks's character in the film Big, it is a child that woke up one day to find itself in the body of adult. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the gung-ho way that Google has pursued the indexing of library book collections. In particular, its failure to engage properly with copyright holders until forced to do so by letters of complaint and lawsuits seems downright dumb – it surely could have had many publishers on side if only it had been more adroit at handling the politics and psychology of the situation. That it failed to do so is a disservice not to publishers, but to Google's own users and shareholders....

Yet far more than being angry with Google about the Library Project, publishers should be furious with themselves for not having already spotted and exploited the same idea. It took Apple to show the reluctant and clueless music industry how to sell its back catalogues online, and now Google is leading book publishers – kicking and screaming – down the same path. Both episodes are to the great shame of those industries, which don't deserve to prosper if they remain blind to such huge opportunities when they heave into view. Whatever the current legal arguments, the full-text indexing of books is inevitable. This is not because Google (or their rivals) want it, but because readers want it. Publishers' slowness to recognise this has weakened them strategically because they will be less able to define and control whatever services eventually emerge. But instead of ruing past mistakes, publishers should concentrate on future opportunities, which could still be substantial. Despite their protestations, Google Print, including the Library Project, has the potential to greatly enhance most publishing businesses – if only they don't let this opportunity go to waste. At a stroke, thousands of old and obscure titles that used to be worth precisely nothing will start to appear before the eyes of millions of potential buyers. Providing that publishers can come up with ways to satisfy the resulting demand, which will be spread thinly across large numbers of titles, this 'long tail' might collectively be worth as much as the far smaller numbers of titles that are currently in print. Contrary to popular belief, many publishers understand this. Their locking horns with Google over the Library Project is...really...an attempt to reassert control over 'their' content with an eye to the longer-term risks of disintermediation....

Current copyright laws were designed for a world in which it was infeasible either to restrict what a reader could do with a book after he purchased it, or for that reader to make and distribute countless pristine copies. The system worked well because the very limitations of existing technologies assured a degree of balance between the two extremes of overbearing control and widespread piracy. The digital world has increasingly made both extremes possible, resulting in a monumental battle over which one will prevail. While this plays out, we see each side come up with competing absurdities: as content vendors spend money to reduce the value of their products to paying customers (e.g., by restricting where a DVD can be played), search engines systematically flout copyright law by delivering cached copies of third-party web pages. If we had enlightened and forward-thinking legislators, they would have long since stepped in to redefine this balance and to clarify fundamental issues that have been left unresolved: Is it legal to make a full-text index without the copyright-holder's explicit permission? What about distributing copies of other people's web pages? Thanks to Google and its peers, everyone from the schoolchild to the scientist has come to depend on these activities, and hundreds of billions of dollars of commercial value has been built on them. Given this, it is insane that their legal status is still open to question. Have legislators been deaf to the questions that are still being asked a decade or more after the web entered everyday life?...So while Google has to mature, it is publishers and politicians who still have the most to do. They must adapt their businesses and laws to work in a new, unfamiliar land edging into view on the horizon, a place that our children are already colonising. This is a world in which our abilities to find, reinvent and share are being set free from the limits of the physical world. The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there.