I doubt we'll see much change in how people do things for quite some  
time.  First, the number of ways has to grow and at least two of them  
have to become as easy as reading a book.

On Jan 23, 2007, at 12:40 PM, Peter Altschul wrote:


Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book?

Bryan Appleyard

The Sunday Times January 21, 2007 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ 
article/0,,2092-2557653,00.html

The world's libraries are heading for the internet, says Bryan  
Appleyard. If this means we lose touch with real books and treat  
their content as "information', civilisation is the loser

"The majority of information," said Jens Redmer, director of Google  
Book Search in Europe, "lies outside the internet."

Redmer was speaking last week at Unbound, an invitation-only  
conference at the New York Public Library (NYPL). It was a groovy,  
bleeding-edge-of-the- internet kind of affair. There was Chris  
Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, a  
book about the new business economics of the net. There was Arianna  
Huffington, grand panjandrum of both the blogosphere and smart East  
Coast society.

But this wasn't just another jolly. There were also publishers and  
Google execs, two groups of people who might one day soon be fighting  
for their professional lives before the Supreme Court.

For Unbound was another move in a strange, complex and frequently  
obscure war that is being fought over the digitisation of the great  
libraries of the world. The details of this war may seem baffling,  
but there is nothing baffling about what is at stake. Intellectual  
property -- intangibles like ideas, knowledge and information -- is,  
in the globalised world, the most valuable of all assets. China may  
be booming on the basis of manufacturing, but, overwhelmingly, it  
makes things invented and designed in the West or Japan. Intellectual  
property is the big difference between the developing and developed  
worlds.

But intellectual property rights and the internet are uneasy  
bedfellows. Google's stated mission is "to organize the world's  
information and make it universally accessible and useful". The words  
"universally accessible" carry the implicit threat that nobody can  
actually own or earn revenue from any information since it will all  
be just out there.

Furthermore, Redmer's point indicates that, for Google, the mission  
has barely left base camp. Himalayas of information are still waiting  
to be conquered. And the highest peaks of all are the great libraries  
of the world, the repositories of the 100m or more books that have  
been produced since Johann Gutenberg invented movable type in the  
15th century.

In December 2004, Google announced its assault on these peaks. It had  
made a deal with five libraries -- with the NYPL and at the  
universities of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford -- to scan  
their stocks, making their contents available online via Google Book  
Search (books.google.com). Ultimately, it is thought, some 30m  
volumes will be involved. Microsoft, meanwhile, has made a deal with  
the British Library to scan 100,000 books -- 25m pages -- this year  
alone. Google has now scanned 1m books.

The first thing to be said is that Google Book Search, though still  
in its "beta" or unfinalised form, is an astonishing mechanism.  
Putting my own name in came up with 626 references and gave me  
immediate access to passages containing my name in books, most of  
which were quite unknown to me. Moreover, clicking on one of these  
references brings up an image of the actual page in question.

But the second thing to be said is that I could read whole passages  
of my books of which I own the copyright. At once a huge intellectual  
property issue looms. The Americans are ploughing ahead with this,  
scanning in material both in and out of copyright. The British -- at  
Oxford's Bodleian Library and the British Library -- are being more  
cautious, allowing only the scanning of out-of-copyright books. This  
may, of course, mean nothing, since the big American libraries will,  
like the Bodleian and the British Library, contain every book  
published in English, so they will all ultimately be out there on the  
net.

American publishers are not happy. Before its 2004 announcement,  
Google had been doing deals with individual publishers to scan their  
books. But digitising the libraries would seem to render these deals  
defunct. Furthermore, since Google is acquiring copyright material at  
no cost, it seems to be treating books quite differently from all  
other media. It is prepared to pay for video and music, but not,  
apparently, for books. The Google defence is that their Book Search  
system is covered by the legal concept of "fair dealing". No more  
than 20% of a copyright book will be available, the search is  
designed to show just relevant passages, and it will provide links to  
sites where the book can be bought.

Unimpressed, the Authors Guild, supported by the Association of  
American Publishers, has started a class action suit against Google.  
A deal may yet be done, but neither side sounds in a compromising  
mood, and it looks likely that this will go all the way to the  
Supreme Court, whose ruling on this case may prove momentous.

But still, we are only in the foothills of the library digitisation  
issue. When Google made its 2004 announcement, Jean-Noël Jeanneney,  
president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, experienced  
"neither distress nor irritation at the project. Just a healthy  
jolt". He welcomed the idea that "a treasure trove of knowledge,  
accumulated for centuries, would be opened up to the benefit of all,"  
but he was also "seized by anxiety". Driven by this anxiety, he wrote  
a short book, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge.

Though he declines to talk of "a crusade or a cultural war", the book  
is a clear case of "aux armes, citoyens!" The citizens in question  
are, in this case, European rather than just French, for Jeanneney  
sees the Google project as an act of American cultural hegemony. He  
has won the backing of Chirac for a project to develop a European  
search engine to rival Google, the so-called "Airbus solution" -- the  
creation of Airbus was a deliberate attempt to combat the ascendancy  
of Boeing in aircraft manufacture.

Jeanneney says that Google is not what it seems. Its search results  
are biased by commercial and cultural pressures. He has a point. Try  
this: go to Google Book Search and enter Gustave Flaubert. The first  
results are full of English translations of Madame Bovary.

The books of the English-speaking world are given overwhelming  
priority. Equally, Google's main search engine produces paid-for  
sites. Google is a profit machine. Nothing wrong with that, as long  
as we don't delude ourselves into thinking it is an entirely neutral  
source of information.

But there are even deeper issues revolving around the distinction  
between information and knowledge. "A search engine," says John  
Sutherland, professor of English at UCL, "is not an index."

An index is the work of a mind with knowledge, search engine results  
are the product of an algorithm with information. Parents will  
already have seen the power of the algorithm. Google has supplanted  
the textbook as the source of homework research.

Furthermore, with the advance of library digitisation, students will  
increasingly get through their degrees on screen rather than in  
libraries. Indeed, Bill Gates expects in the very near future that  
Microsoft will be able to give all undergraduates a $400 hand-held  
device that will contain all the text books they need for their  
course. We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books,  
the primary experience and foundation of civilisation for the last  
500 years.

Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, refuses to  
see this in apocalyptic terms. With 100,000 of her books being  
scanned by Microsoft this year, she regards the ultimate digitisation  
of the library's entire 150m-item collection (journals included) as  
"a wonderful outcome, though I suspect I'll be long dead by then".

Brindley disagrees with Jeanneney about having to fight off American  
hegemony. She points out that search engines are still in their  
infancy. Google has competitors that are bound to eat into its  
monopoly. Furthermore, improved technologies will make search results  
more like indexes, working more precisely as knowledge providers than  
simple information dispensers. The British Library has no choice, she  
believes, but to go with this technological flow. The alternative is  
to become little more than "a book museum".

Back at the NYPL, David Worlock of Electronic Publishing Services  
said, "Ultimately it's not up to Google or the publishers to decide  
how books will be read. It's the readers who will have the final say."

No, it is the teachers who will have the final say. They will  
determine whether people will read for information, knowledge or,  
ultimately, wisdom. If they fail and their pupils read only for  
information, then we are in deep trouble. For the net doesn't educate  
and the mind must be primed to deal with its informational deluge. On  
that priming depends the future of civilisation. How we handle the  
digitising of the libraries will determine who we are to become.

Additional reporting: Dominic Rushe
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