The books and the Google
Having lived through the ebook boomlet and the evil that was Versaware and pre-OCLC NetLibrary, my first question on hearing that Google’s going to digitize a bunch of library books was “Who retains the files and rights to use them?”
Points for Google, however; I guess at least sometimes they mean it when they say their motto is “Don’t be evil.” Per the abovelinked article, “The university will also be given a copy of each file to use as they see fit.” Bravo. I wholeheartedly approve of that.
(Of course, Google may have intended to be evil until the librarians talked them out of it. Thank heaven librarians are smarter about these things than publishers.)
My guess is there will be decidedly mixed reviews in libraryland. Didn’t we collectively think we’d be leading the way into our rightful future as the guardians and disseminators of digital text?
Well, I think we’re looking at the future, and I am not sure it is us.
Few different things about that. One, who the hell cares who does it as long as it’s done right? I so don’t hold with dog-in-the-manger. We don’t have the money to do this kind of thing. Google does. QED.
Of course, a valuable question nobody seems to be asking is what Google is going to do with digitization expertise once they have it. Since they’re not glomming onto the files or the IP rights thereto as did Versaware the Unutterably Evil, they must be hoping to learn something from it. If there’s a plausible argument that they’re going to be evil in future with what they learn, then we might indeed do well to tell them to go soak their corporate head. But for once, I don’t have a conspiracy theory to offer. Anybody else got any?
Two, who honestly thinks Google is going to keep this up in perpetuity? Anyone? Anyone? I didn’t think so. Google’s going for the big scores. They’ll leave plenty for us. Guaranteed.
Three, it strikes me as possible Google’s bitten off more than it can chew; text digitization has this horrible habit of sounding easier than it is. Wait a year and see. Before we lament the demise of our digitization expertise and experience, let’s check its pulse, hm?
In the meantime—I’m cautiously optimistic about this. We’ll see how it goes.