Google and the libraries, International Herald Tribune, 12/5/08

OpEd: Via International Herald Tribune: Google and the libraries:

"In 2004, Google signed a deal with five major research libraries to digitize all the books in their collections. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and we're excited to be working with libraries to help make this mission a reality" proclaimed company cofounder Larry Page. It looked like an encouraging first step toward a world in which all knowledge was online, all the time.

Not everyone was so enthralled with this beatific vision of the Future According to Google.

Authors had the temerity to insist they be paid for their digitized content, which was going to be used to sell Google ads, or, down the road, be loaded into a possible Google Reader. The Authors Guild sued, and eventually settled with Google, resulting in a complicated agreement about royalty payments that awaits the approval of a judge.

Libraries excluded from the Google project wondered where they would fit in. The words "Free to All" are etched in stone above the Boston Public Library, but last I checked, those words do not appear on the fuselages of the Boeings and Gulfstreams owned by Google founders Page and Sergey Brin.

Google executives sound like they are doing the world an immense favor by digitizing books, rarely mentioning that they are in business to sell stuff, not give it away...

In a heated philippic, "Free Our Libraries!" posted on the Web site of the Boston Library Consortium, Richard Johnson, an adviser to the Association of Research Libraries, decries the "momentous, ill-considered shift...that threatens to limit the public rights in the collections assembled and maintained, often at public expense, in libraries around the globe."

"Companies are paying nothing for access to the crown jewels," Johnson writes. "We may awaken one day to find that our digital heritage has become private property rather than a public good."

Librarians of the world, unite! You have everything to lose: your books."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edbeam.php