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Nov. 27, 2007

Paul Courant, the University of Michigan's head librarian recently defended his employer's relationship with Google, saying that "the University and Google are changing the world for the better." Of course, this project is highly controversial and not everyone agrees with it.

With its own and limited resources, the university would probably have a lesser chance of successfully duplicating so many books on its own. It could also partner with other projects like the OCA (Open Content Alliance) which won't display any snippets from copyrighted works unless the publisher opts in to the program.

Nevertheless, Courant still argues that time is of the essence is this project. Courant goes on to say that Google is the only company who can get the most done in the least amount of time.

Courant then added "we have a whole slew of students who won't find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically. At the slow rate that the OCA is digitizing documents these students will be dandling great-grandchildren on their knees before these great collections can be found anywhere electronically... (!)"

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor at the University of Virginia said that "Google has no such control. After Google scans a book, they return the book to the library like any other user, and they give us a copy of the digital file. Google is not the only entity controlling access to the collection. The University of Michigan and other partner libraries control access as well, except we don't think of it as controlling access so much as providing it."

Vaidhyanathan added that he is working on a critical book about Google, and he argues that the current book-scanning program is riddled with problems. Public institutions, he argued in a response to Courant, should not be making these sorts of deals with private companies, especially when those companies are as dominant in their fields as Google today is!

Previously, Courant has served as an economics professor at the university, and he says that his economic work on public goods has convinced him just how bad it would be for society if one company ended up with sole control over large swathes of cultural knowledge.

But so far, he doesn't believe that Michigan's partnership with Google Book Search will create such problems. Courant also wonders how the "library copy" retained by the library is not an "audacious infringement" of copyright? It violates both the copyright holder's right to copy and right to distribute.

"Doesn't a university library have an obligation to explain this?" he asks. Courant then tries to do so in a response of his own. He takes special aim at this last criticism about copyright, one that has been repeatedly leveled at Google as well.

Overall, The University of Michigan uses the scanned files in its own system, allowing patrons to search through books and various documents for keywords and to view complete pages of works no longer covered by copyright. But Michigan, like Google, does claim to respect copyright by not showing more than tiny snippets from copyrighted texts.

Google's book scanning debate, which has been raging in various forms for the last two years, is driven in part by the tremendous sense of what's at stake. Book search projects like the one undertaken by Google have huge potential to transform public access to books and archival material, especially now that Google has broadened its program to include French-language texts and texts from India.

However, Vaidhyanathan remains largely unconvinced, and in a later post referred to Michigan's arrangement with Google as "massive corporate welfare."

The New Yorker tried to put the whole debate in perspective a couple weeks back in a lengthy piece that looks at the history of textual production.

"Google's projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it," notes Anthony Grafton. Those prophecies can be either apocalyptic or utopian, and the debate between Courant and Vaidhyanathan illustrates perfectly how two academics can look at the same data and see either the Four Horsemen or the Garden of Eden," wrote the New Yorker.

The Chronicle for Higher Education, which has also been covering the debate, notes that digitization practices and the existence of quality controls could become even more important if readers take to digital books.

Products like the new Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader make that a plausible future scenario, though neither device looks likely to displace paper, least not yet.

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Source: Ars Technica