A New Essay by Robert Darnton About Google and the Digital Future + Other Darnton Material
If you don't want to review other Robert Darnton essays and find links to listen to him interviewed, skip this section and head to the *** to find a link and a few key passage from Darnton's new essay that runs nearly 7500 words.
Book historian and the Director of the Harvard University Library, Robert Darnton, has been doing a bunch of interviews his new book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. You can read some of the book for free by clicking on the cover and taking a look "inside" its Amazon.com entry. In case you're wondering, the book is in the Google Book database but you cannot preview it. Additionally, the first subject heading assigned to it is fiction which is incorrect.
***If all of that material wasn't enough to keep you reading for a several hours, Darnton's latest essay, "Google and the New Digital Future," went online today on The New York Review of Books web site.
The focus of the essay is Darnton telling the story of the days immediately before and after Google Book Search, Settlement 2.0 was released on Friday, November 13, 2009.
Even if you have been tracking the GBS case and the lead-up to Settlement 2.0 over the past couple of months, the essay is still worth reading as a review. If you haven't been following the case, the essay provides a fact-filled superbly written discussion of the events that got the case to Settlement 2.0 along with some discussion of what could be next.
Here are just a few notes from our first reading:
*Darnton begins the essay taking note of the many historic events that took place on November 9th. From the first sighting of land by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620 to the Berlin Wall Falling in 1989.
Not comparable [the Google Book Search Settlement 2.0 was originally scheduled for November 9th] to the fall of the Berlin Wall, you might say. True, but for several months, all eyes in the world of books—authors, publishers, librarians, and a great many readers—were trained on the court and its judge, Denny Chin, because this seemingly small-scale squabble over copyright looked likely to determine the digital future for all of us.
Darnton then goes into a review of the Google Book Search case and lays out his views, positive and negative.
Comment: It's sad that when background about books digitization is told, Michael Hart from Project Gutenberg (it's been doing its thing since 1971) is often never mentioned. In this recent interview with Hart, he explains how he was first advising Google and then after leaving, they did the opposite of what he said they should do. He says, "If they [Google] had started out by emphasizing the public domain it probably would have worked out a lot better for them in the press as the good will they would have built up would have gone a long way."
We also don't always read about the many groups (Brewster Kahle and Internet Archive is just one example) digitizing books. Just monitor this page for a few days to see for yourself.
Finally, in terms of new titles, Amazon.com allows users to read portions of books online and then purchase them in paper or download an eBook. In other words book digitization is not a zero-sum game.
More After a Click
Who ultimately wins is not simply a matter of competition among potential entrepreneurs but an issue of enormous importance to everyone who cares about books, even though the public is reduced to the role of spectator.
Darnton continues with a discussion of some of the legal briefs filed by German and French groups.
Near the end of the essay, these two paragraphs:
The most ambitious solution would transform Google's digital database into a truly public library. That, of course, would require an act of Congress, one that would make a decisive break with the American habit of determining public issues by private lawsuit. The legislation would have to settle ancillary problems—how to adjust copyright, deal with orphan books, and compensate Google for its investment in digitizing—but it would have the advantage of clearing up a messy legal landscape and of giving the American people what they deserve: a national digital library equal to the needs of the twenty-first century. But it is not clear how Google would react to such a buyout.
If state intervention is deemed to go too far against the American grain, a minimal solution could be devised for the private sector. Congress would have to intervene with legislation to protect the digitization of orphan works from lawsuits, but it would not need to appropriate funds. Instead, funding could come from a coalition of foundations. The digitizing, open-access distribution, and preservation of orphan works could be done by a nonprofit organization such as the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group that was built as a digital library of texts, images, and archived Web pages. In order to avoid conflict with interests in the current commercial market, the database would include only books in the public domain and orphan works. Its time span would increase as copyrights expired, and it could include an opt-in provision for rightsholders of books that are in copyright but out of print.
The work need not be done in haste. At the rate of a million books a year, we would have a great library, free and accessible to everyone, within a decade. And the job would be done right, with none of the missing pages, botched images, faulty editions, omitted artwork, censoring, and misconceived cataloging that mar Google's enterprise. Bibliographers—who appear to play little or no part in Google's enterprise—would direct operations along with computer engineers. Librarians would cooperate with both in order to assure the preservation of the books, another weak point in GBS, because Google is not committed to maintaining its corpus, and digitized texts easily degrade or become inaccessible.
Comment: Here's something we've wondered about since the first days of Google Print/Google Book Search and were reminded of it in the first paragraph above. Why is it assumed that if the database turns into, "truly public library," that Google would be in charge and be the principal scanning organization? We thought it was a public library. As we said earlier, Google is not the only organization scanning books and other print materials. Why couldn't the scanning be spread out across various organization with a centralized database in place to help reduce duplication (the same titled scanned by one or more groups) and get the job done in a more expedited manner.
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