The good, The bad, and Google Books.

The article by the Open Book Alliance sets out some of the key arguments against what could end up being one of the defining moments in how books are accessed by the next generation of students and users. The Key issue is Google's continuing push to digitize large collections of books (some ten million) and the settlement with the Association of American Publishers (AAP) which clears a path for them to do so. The key issue that the authors raise is access and I for one see their point on many of the issues that they raise but I have some reservations with their arguments.

The nature of the settlement with Google or rather I should more correctly say the nature of the settlement as I have had it explained to me by various news sources many with biases that should be acknowledged, is that this settlement hands Google a great amount of control over the collections Google a monopoly on the dataset. This monopoly, it is feared, will make competition with Google in the realm of book searching impossible. Google will have the ability to set the price for access to the dataset and this pricing structure could be prohibitive to small institutions widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

This argument is very interesting to me. I for one understand the fear of handing over vast sums of information to a corporate entity whose primary concern is the fiduciary well being of its share holders, however I still use Gmail. I used it to get the account I am posting this on. I still use a large number of Google programs, documents, reader, search , etc. Every time I use these I know that somewhere out there Google is keeping track of the information that I give it and using it to do.... something. I guess my point here is that I am not convinced it is in the fiduciary well being of Google to act in a restrictive way with the digital collection that they are building. (And yes I do think that this is a digital collection rather than a digital library despite the fact that books are being digitized).

However, I do believe in balance and I support what the Open Book Alliance is doing by promoting a “fair and flexible” solution. This project has been in the offing for quite some time (2006 by my count) why was this coalition so long in the building?

I do want to say that there are two main issues here which are pros and cons in my mind concerning this settlement.

Pro: What really excites me about Google acting as the driving force behind the push for book digitization is the possibilities of interaction that with the written word that this project promises. Google has extensive API libraries and is very friendly towards processes that allow data to be manipulated in a variety of ways. This could potentially be a great boon to those who have been looking for interactive libraries for years. This could be the catalyst that sort of interoperability.

Con: The way this deal was reached. I really think that this settlement set a difficult precedent for the way issues of copyright and use to be decided. I am not at all comfortable with the settlement.

Google might not be evil but that does not make this sort of legal wrangling beneficial to the culture as a whole.