Sunday, April 08, 2007

Google Book Search

In yesterday's Guardian John Lanchester tackles the issue of copyright and Google Book Search in a wide-ranging and thoughtful article which counterbalances the alarmed views of publisher Nigel Newton expressed in the same paper a year ago. Lanchester points out that there is no breach of copyright in GBS: if publishers do not join the book-scanning programme then only a tiny snippet of text of any of their books in print is available, yet the books are drawn to public attention and links provided to shops and libraries where they are available - which seems to me more like a service and free advertising than anything, as Kate Hyde points out on her blog. And if publishers do opt in, then only 20% of a book is available online, and you have to buy it or borrow it from a library to read the rest.

The real area of contention, says Lanchester, is those books which are still in copyright but out of print, and which 'Google wants to make available online.' His implication seems to be that Google wants to make them available online in their entirety: 'It seems to me this would mean, in some crucial sense, Google was actually the publisher of the book.'

When I recently discovered on Google Book Search two out-of-print short-story anthologies in which my work had appeared (courtesy of the participating Library of the University of Michigan) I was delighted - work which had been seemed to slip off the face of the earth was suddenly current again! - and when they disappeared off GBS a week or so later (as a result of the ongoing dispute?) I was disappointed. How many people will come across those publications if they are not reinstated on Google? In fact the books appeared in the usual Google formula: only a tiny snippet of the contents page of one was readable, and nothing of the other. Personally, though, I wouldn't have cared a fig if they had appeared whole. Actually, I'd have been happier: one of those stories of mine is not available to read anywhere else, the publishers are never going to reprint those books, and I can find only one used copy of one book and four of the other for sale on the web. Neither the publishers nor we contributors are going to make any more money out of those books, and I for one would rather those stories were still being read.

2 comments:

Pants said...

Hi EB. If I'm reading Lanchester correctly, what he's suggesting is that Google is playing a long game and that's the only way this huge project makes sense. As he points out, no one is going to choose to read a classic novel on line so why provide it? Books are usually out of print because of low demand so why provide them? Last time I looked, Google wasn't an educational charity so what's its motivation if not control? I think Lanchester is quite right to suggest that the pressure could easily fall on the profitable 10% of the book trade that is still in the control of publishers and authors to conform to whatever future model Google dictates. Worst case scenario - books could go the way of Betamax whether there is a demand for them or not.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Hi Noosa. Can't say I agree that this is the thrust of Lanchester's argument (in spite of the article's title which I think belies his more measured words), but your point does need serious consideration.

The way I read Lanchester, his question about digitizing the classics reads rather, Why NOT do it? since you're not giving any information away (novels aren't about information), and he thinks that digitization can never truly 'dilute the impact of books' since they are a perfect technology in themselves. (I know it's said that Betamax, which disappeared, was the better technology, but it was not as different in nature from the alternative as concrete books are from digitised versions.) As for out of print books, Lanchester says:

'There is something horrifying about the idea that 70% of all the books ever published are in the limbo of being out of print. Anything that gives those works a new life and new readers, even if only a few a year, has to be welcome.'

Low demand (ie the imperatives of the market) is not necessarily a good reason to leave books out of reach.

Lanchester quotes from his own publishing experience to support the notion that once books go out of copyright and there's a grab for them, far more copies are sold and read, and regarding books in print he quotes Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian: 'I can't see how they'll sell more books by not being in Google.'

Lanchester also says: 'I think the argument between Google and the publishers will be resolved by the evidence. Google is quick to brandish case studies of the ways in which Book Search has helped small publishers; if the evidence mounts to the point of being irrefutable, it will have its effect. Conversely, if there is evidence that too much book content is being given away, and books are starting to slip into the mental category of a product for which people don't expect to pay, then publishers will pull out of the partner programme.'

He is quoting the sceptics rather than stating his own view when he refers to the 'contrast between Google's attitude to everyone else's information, which it wants to make available free, and its attitude to its own proprietary information - the company is famous for its close-mouthedness'.

However, it is this last point, which you yourself also make, which is I have to agree the worry. OK if Google is the champion of the creators against the conglomerates who are writing their own copyright law and suppressing the creatives and therefore creativity, but if Google aren't more open, then what is to say that they are not simply stepping in to take control themselves? In which case, I guess, the current US legal dispute is crucial.