Google & the Future of Books - The New York Review of Books - 0 views
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After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future.
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The only workable tactic may be vigilance
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When I look backward
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The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent
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the Republic of Letters was democratic only in principle
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dominated by the wellborn and the rich
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the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege
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Republic of Letters, as it actually operated, was a closed world, inaccessible to the underprivileged
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invoke the Enlightenment in an argument for openness in general and for open access in particular.
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the present, do we see a similar contradiction between principle and practice
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Our republic was founded on faith in the central principle of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters: the diffusion of light
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For Jefferson, enlightenment took place by means of writers and readers, books and libraries—especially libraries,
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The Founding Fathers acknowledged authors' rights to a fair return on their intellectual labor, but they put public welfare before private profit.
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Twenty-eight years seemed long enough to protect the interests of authors and publishers
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"the Mickey Mouse Protection Act," because Mickey was about to fall into the public domain), it lasts as long as the life of the author plus seventy years. In practice, that normally would mean more than a century.
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When it comes to digitization, access to our cultural heritage generally ends on January 1, 1923, the date from which great numbers of books are subject to copyright laws.
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for example, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, published in 1922, is in the public domain, whereas Lewis's Elmer Gantry, published in 1927, will not enter the public domain until 2022.
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we would see that we live in a world designed by Mickey Mouse, red in tooth and claw.
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professional journals sprouted throughout the fields,
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he learned societies produced them, and the libraries bought them
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Then commercial publishers discovered that they could make a fortune by selling subscriptions to the journals
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the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490
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Fortunately, this picture of the hard facts of life in the world of learning is already going out of date.
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Openness is operating everywhere, thanks to "open access" repositories of digitized articles available free of charge,
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When businesses like Google look at libraries, they do not merely see temples of learning. They see potential assets or what they call "content," ready to be mined. Built up over centuries at an enormous expenditure of money and labor, library collections can be digitized en masse at relatively little cost
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Libraries exist to promote a public good:
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To digitize collections and sell the product in ways that fail to guarantee wide access would be to repeat the mistake that was made when publishers exploited the market for scholarly journals, but on a much greater scale,
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You cannot legislate Enlightenmen
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"Digitize we must." But not on any terms. We must do it in the interest of the public, and that means holding the digitizers responsible to the citizenry.
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Yes, we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize.
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By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.
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The settlement creates an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of the copyright holders
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A "public access license" will make this material available to public libraries, where Google will provide free viewing of the digitized books on one computer terminal.
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And individuals also will be able to access and print out digitized versions of the books by purchasing a "consumer license" from Google, which will cooperate with the registry for the distribution of all the revenue to copyright holders
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Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's largest book business—not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon.
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a single terminal will hardly satisfy the demand in large libraries.
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a boon to the small-town,
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The eighteenth-century philosophers saw monopoly as a main obstacle to the diffusion of knowledge
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Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly.
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a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.
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We could have created a National Digital Library
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It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy—the control of access to information—to be determined by private lawsuit.
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The district court judge will pronounce on the validity of the settlement, but that is primarily a matter of dividing profits, not of promoting the public interest.
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As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information.
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The settlement leaves Google free to negotiate deals with each of its clients, although it announces two guiding principles: "(1) the realization of revenue at market rates for each Book and license on behalf of the Rightsholders and (2) the realization of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education."
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What will happen if Google favors profitability over access?
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it could also employ a strategy comparable to the one that proved to be so effective in pushing up the price of scholarly journals: first, entice subscribers with low initial rates, and then, once they are hooked, ratchet up the rates as high as the traffic will bear.
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The payment will come from the libraries
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the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company
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"How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright."
