In “A Champion of Information Literacy,” William Badke tells us about a former student of his who had left the print world behind. In the article, Badke replays his discussion with the student:
“Student A, mind you, was not simply dumbing down to a Google search, grabbing the first three results and using them willy-nilly. No, he was doing real research using good academic resources.
Journal articles, peer reviewed and all, were easy to get with all the electronic full text available through our proprietary databases. But what about books?
‘Ah,’ he said, without an ounce of shame, ‘I use Google Book Search.’
‘But that won’t always work,’ I told him. ‘Google Book has copyright restrictions that limit you to only a few pages.’
He admitted that such was the case. Then he smiled, exuding confidence. ‘But you can beat it. All you need is 15 Google accounts and you can pretty much read the whole book.’”
A for effort. A for inventivness. But that was then, this is now.
Library subscriptions to Google Books? Does that mean, for a fee, we can all have online access to the entirety of the collections of Harvard, Michigan, NY Public, Oxford, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, etc., etc.? This is huge. We’re talking millions of books…online, searchable, and potentially printable. I have to say, though, that while this is exciting, it’s also somewhat frightening. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, co-creator of the Open Content Alliance, and overseer of the Open Library, warns that the agreement moves libraries “toward a monoculture”:
“One company is trying to be the library system…This is not good for a society that is built on free speech. Let’s have the World Wide Web rather than the iTunes of books.”
He continues elsewhere by noting,
“So if you could become a monopoly of libraries, that could be very good for your shareholders. It just may not be good for society.”
What thinkest you?
Patrick, you are so right that this has large implications and will take a while to sort out…
It sounds like Google is about to become a mega-vendor (or the mega-vendor) of e-books, at least the in-copyright ones.
Also, Harvard apparently won’t be participating in this part of the Google endeavor. According to the Harvard Crimson (10/30/08), University Library Director Robert C. Darnton ’60 said “… the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books …” and further, that “The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable…”
It will be very interesting to see where this goes, and what the other universities involved will do. It does seem that the scanning of out-of-copyright works (in which Harvard is participating) is the more broadly and deeply valuable part of this work, especially if it proves less vulnerable to cost and access limitations.