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May 14, 2006


  Scan This Book!

By KEVIN KELLY

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands 
of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into 
high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page 
by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and 
present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. 
It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a 
library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was 
designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one 
time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated 
to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But 
even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge 
could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant 
expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 
2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings 
like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been 
a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally 
scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents 
searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the 
explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, 
has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the 
long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that 
the universal library is now within reach. "This is our chance to one-up 
the Greeks!" he shouts. "It is really possible with the technology of 
today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the 
people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, 
like putting a man on the moon." And unlike the libraries of old, which 
were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, 
offering every book to every person.

But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written 
material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we 
now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library 
and its "books" will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing 
us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of 
the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine.

*1. Scanning the Library of Libraries*

Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't 
make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask 
and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their 
texts are made available in a single database, search technology will 
enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a 
complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in 
any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal 
library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece 
of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should 
include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can 
we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions 
of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts 
now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works 
of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, 
available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you'll be 
able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From 
the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at 
least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 
500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short 
films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently 
contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully 
digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological 
rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the 
size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's 
technology, it will all fit onto your iPod 
<http://tech2.nytimes.com/gst/technology/techsearch.html?st=p&cat=&query=ipod&inline=nyt-classifier>. 
When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or 
wallet — if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. 
Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things 
happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. 
(Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

Technology accelerates the migration of all we know into the universal form 
of digital bits. Nikon will soon quit making film cameras for consumers, 
and Minolta already has: better think digital photos from now on. Nearly 
100 percent of all contemporary recorded music has already been digitized, 
much of it by fans. About one-tenth of the 500,000 or so movies listed on 
the Internet Movie Database are now digitized on DVD. But because of 
copyright issues and the physical fact of the need to turn pages, the 
digitization of books has proceeded at a relative crawl. At most, one book 
in 20 has moved from analog to digital. So far, the universal library is a 
library without many books.

But that is changing very fast. Corporations and libraries around the world 
are now scanning about a million books per year. Amazon has digitized 
several hundred thousand contemporary books. In the heart of Silicon 
Valley, Stanford University (one of the five libraries collaborating with 
Google) is scanning its eight-million-book collection using a state-of-the 
art robot from the Swiss company 4DigitalBooks. This machine, the size of a 
small S.U.V., automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at 
the rate of 1,000 pages per hour. A human operator places a book in a flat 
carriage, and then pneumatic robot fingers flip the pages — delicately 
enough to handle rare volumes — under the scanning eyes of digital cameras.

Like many other functions in our global economy, however, the real work has 
been happening far away, while we sleep. We are outsourcing the scanning of 
the universal library. Superstar, an entrepreneurial company based in 
Beijing, has scanned every book from 900 university libraries in China. It 
has already digitized 1.3 million unique titles in Chinese, which it 
estimates is about half of all the books published in the Chinese language 
since 1949. It costs $30 to scan a book at Stanford but only $10 in China.

Raj Reddy, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, decided to move a 
fair-size English-language library to where the cheap subsidized scanners 
were. In 2004, he borrowed 30,000 volumes from the storage rooms of the 
Carnegie Mellon library and the Carnegie Library and packed them off to 
China in a single shipping container to be scanned by an assembly line of 
workers paid by the Chinese. His project, which he calls the Million Book 
Project, is churning out 100,000 pages per day at 20 scanning stations in 
India and China. Reddy hopes to reach a million digitized books in two years.

The idea is to seed the bookless developing world with easily available 
texts. Superstar sells copies of books it scans back to the same university 
libraries it scans from. A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume 
library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per 
digital book acquired, it's a cheap way for a library to increase its 
collection. Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's e-publishing 
business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to 
wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get 
Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital 
libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people 
worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books." It is these 
underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in 
Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned 
version of the universal library is placed in their hands.

*2. What Happens When Books Connect*

The least important, but most discussed, aspects of digital reading have 
been these contentious questions: Will we give up the highly evolved 
technology of ink on paper and instead read on cumbersome machines? Or will 
we keep reading our paperbacks on the beach? For now, the answer is yes to 
both. Yes, publishers have lost millions of dollars on the long-prophesied 
e-book revolution that never occurred, while the number of physical books 
sold in the world each year continues to grow. At the same time, there are 
already more than a half a billion PDF documents on the Web that people 
happily read on computers without printing them out, and still more people 
now spend hours watching movies on microscopic cellphone screens. The 
arsenal of our current display technology — from handheld gizmos to large 
flat screens — is already good enough to move books to their next stage of 
evolution: a full digital scan.

Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) 
assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one 
another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each 
book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author 
completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a 
reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this 
vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — 
the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits, which permits it to 
be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution 
birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is 
simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real 
magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is 
cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, 
remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In 
the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the 
other pages.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic amateurs have 
written and cross-referenced an entire online encyclopedia called 
Wikipedia. Buoyed by this success, many nerds believe that a billion 
readers can reliably weave together the pages of old books, one hyperlink 
at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author or 
favorite book will, over time, link up its important parts. Multiply that 
simple generous act by millions of readers, and the universal library can 
be integrated in full, by fans for fans.

In addition to a link, which explicitly connects one word or sentence or 
book to another, readers will also be able to add tags, a recent innovation 
on the Web but already a popular one. A tag is a public annotation, like a 
keyword or category name, that is hung on a file, page, picture or song, 
enabling anyone to search for that file. For instance, on the photo-sharing 
site Flickr, hundreds of viewers will "tag" a photo submitted by another 
user with their own simple classifications of what they think the picture 
is about: "goat," "Paris," "goofy," "beach party." Because tags are 
user-generated, when they move to the realm of books, they will be assigned 
faster, range wider and serve better than out-of-date schemes like the 
Dewey Decimal System, particularly in frontier or fringe areas like 
nanotechnology or body modification.

The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the 
last 50 years. They get their initial wave of power when we first code them 
into bits of text, but their real transformative energies fire up as 
ordinary users click on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware 
that each humdrum click "votes" on a link, elevating its rank of relevance. 
You may think you are just browsing, casually inspecting this paragraph or 
that page, but in fact you are anonymously marking up the Web with bread 
crumbs of attention. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by 
search engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the end 
points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag. This is a 
type of intelligence common on the Web, but previously foreign to the world 
of books.

Once a book has been integrated into the new expanded library by means of 
this linking, its text will no longer be separate from the text in other 
books. For instance, today a serious nonfiction book will usually have a 
bibliography and some kind of footnotes. When books are deeply linked, 
you'll be able to click on the title in any bibliography or any footnote 
and find the actual book referred to in the footnote. The books referenced 
in that book's bibliography will themselves be available, and so you can 
hop through the library in the same way we hop through Web links, traveling 
from footnote to footnote to footnote until you reach the bottom of things.

Next come the words. Just as a Web article on, say, aquariums, can have 
some of its words linked to definitions of fish terms, any and all words in 
a digitized book can be hyperlinked to other parts of other books. Books, 
including fiction, will become a web of names and a community of ideas.

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power 
of relationships, which is all links really are. There are about 100 
billion Web pages, and each page holds, on average, 10 links. That's a 
trillion electrified connections coursing through the Web. This tangle of 
relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static 
world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of 
relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other 
books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave 
themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to 
see things we can't see in a single, isolated book.

When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity. Bookmarks 
can be shared with fellow readers. Marginalia can be broadcast. 
Bibliographies swapped. You might get an alert that your friend Carl has 
annotated a favorite book of yours. A moment later, his links are yours. In 
a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large 
single text: the world's only book.

*3. Books: The Liquid Version*

At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages 
or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be 
remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music 
audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists," as 
they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the 
creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection of texts, some as short as 
a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's 
worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once 
created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public 
commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as 
snippets or to be remixed as pages. The ability to purchase, read and 
manipulate individual pages or sections is surely what will drive reference 
books (cookbooks, how-to manuals, travel guides) in the future. You might 
concoct your own "cookbook shelf" of Cajun recipes compiled from many 
different sources; it would include Web pages, magazine clippings and 
entire Cajun cookbooks. Amazon currently offers you a chance to publish 
your own bookshelves (Amazon calls them "listmanias") as annotated lists of 
books you want to recommend on a particular esoteric subject. And readers 
are already using Google Book Search to round up minilibraries on a certain 
topic — all books about Sweden, for instance, or books on clocks. Once 
snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and 
transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an 
excellent collection.

Libraries (as well as many individuals) aren't eager to relinquish 
ink-on-paper editions, because the printed book is by far the most durable 
and reliable backup technology we have. Printed books require no mediating 
device to read and thus are immune to technological obsolescence. Paper is 
also extremely stable, compared with, say, hard drives or even CD's. In 
this way, the stability and fixity of a bound book is a blessing. It sits 
there unchanging, true to its original creation. But it sits alone.

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid 
fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the 
margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero 
audience they usually have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the 
distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of 
the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership 
of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library 
will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course 
of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library 
of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly 
incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular 
subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a 
species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective 
ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are 
drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved 
in scholarship today, but it will become routine.

Finally, the full, complete universal library of all works becomes more 
than just a better Ask Jeeves. Search on the Web becomes a new 
infrastructure for entirely new functions and services. Right now, if you 
mash up Google Maps and Monster.com, you get maps of where jobs are located 
by salary. In the same way, it is easy to see that in the great library, 
everything that has ever been written about, for example, Trafalgar Square 
in London could be present on that spot via a screen. In the same way, 
every object, event or location on earth would "know" everything that has 
ever been written about it in any book, in any language, at any time. From 
this deep structuring of knowledge comes a new culture of interaction and 
participation.

The main drawback of this vision is a big one. So far, the universal 
library lacks books. Despite the best efforts of bloggers and the creators 
of the Wikipedia, most of the world's expertise still resides in books. And 
a universal library without the contents of books is no universal library 
at all.

There are dozens of excellent reasons that books should quickly be made 
part of the emerging Web. But so far they have not been, at least not in 
great numbers. And there is only one reason: the hegemony of the copy.

*4. The Triumph of the Copy*

The desire of all creators is for their works to find their way into all 
minds. A text, a melody, a picture or a story succeeds best if it is 
connected to as many ideas and other works as possible. Ideally, over time 
a work becomes so entangled in a culture that it appears to be inseparable 
from it, in the way that the Bible, Shakespeare's plays, "Cinderella" and 
the Mona Lisa are inseparable from ours. This tendency for creative ideas 
to infiltrate other works is great news for culture. In fact, this 
commingling of creations is culture.

In preindustrial times, exact copies of a work were rare for a simple 
reason: it was much easier to make your own version of a creation than to 
duplicate someone else's exactly. The amount of energy and attention needed 
to copy a scroll exactly, word for word, or to replicate a painting stroke 
by stroke exceeded the cost of paraphrasing it in your own style. So most 
works were altered, and often improved, by the borrower before they were 
passed on. Fairy tales evolved mythic depth as many different authors 
worked on them and as they migrated from spoken tales to other media 
(theater, music, painting). This system worked well for audiences and 
performers, but the only way for most creators to earn a living from their 
works was through the support of patrons.

That ancient economics of creation was overturned at the dawn of the 
industrial age by the technologies of mass production. Suddenly, the cost 
of duplication was lower than the cost of appropriation. With the advent of 
the printing press, it was now cheaper to print thousands of exact copies 
of a manuscript than to alter one by hand. Copy makers could profit more 
than creators. This imbalance led to the technology of copyright, which 
established a new order. Copyright bestowed upon the creator of a work a 
temporary monopoly — for 14 years, in the United States — over any copies 
of the work. The idea was to encourage authors and artists to create yet 
more works that could be cheaply copied and thus fill the culture with 
public works.

Not coincidentally, public libraries first began to flourish with the 
advent of cheap copies. Before the industrial age, libraries were primarily 
the property of the wealthy elite. With mass production, every small town 
could afford to put duplicates of the greatest works of humanity on wooden 
shelves in the village square. Mass access to public-library books inspired 
scholarship, reviewing and education, activities exempted in part from the 
monopoly of copyright in the United States because they moved creative 
works toward the public commons sooner, weaving them into the fabric of 
common culture while still remaining under the author's copyright. These 
are now known as "fair uses."

This wonderful balance was undone by good intentions. The first was a new 
copyright law passed by Congress in 1976. According to the new law, 
creators no longer had to register or renew copyright; the simple act of 
creating something bestowed it with instant and automatic rights. By 
default, each new work was born under private ownership rather than in the 
public commons. At first, this reversal seemed to serve the culture of 
creation well. All works that could be copied gained instant and deep 
ownership, and artists and authors were happy. But the 1976 law, and 
various revisions and extensions that followed it, made it extremely 
difficult to move a work into the public commons, where human creations 
naturally belong and were originally intended to reside. As more 
intellectual property became owned by corporations rather than by 
individuals, those corporations successfully lobbied Congress to keep 
extending the once-brief protection enabled by copyright in order to 
prevent works from returning to the public domain. With constant nudging, 
Congress moved the expiration date from 14 years to 28 to 42 and then to 56.

While corporations and legislators were moving the goal posts back, 
technology was accelerating forward. In Internet time, even 14 years is a 
long time for a monopoly; a monopoly that lasts a human lifetime is 
essentially an eternity. So when Congress voted in 1998 to extend copyright 
an additional 70 years beyond the life span of a creator — to a point where 
it could not possibly serve its original purpose as an incentive to keep 
that creator working — it was obvious to all that copyright now existed 
primarily to protect a threatened business model. And because Congress at 
the same time tacked a 20-year extension onto all existing copyrights, 
nothing — no published creative works of any type — will fall out of 
protection and return to the public domain until 2019. Almost everything 
created today will not return to the commons until the next century. Thus 
the stream of shared material that anyone can improve (think "A Thousand 
and One Nights" or "Amazing Grace" or "Beauty and the Beast") will largely 
dry up.

In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a 
perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been 
abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. 
In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn't find it profitable to 
keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn't 
know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were 
not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is 
shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world's libraries are 
orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A 
luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal 
library, is dark.

*5. The Moral Imperative to Scan*

The 15 percent of the world's 32 million cataloged books that are in the 
public domain are freely available for anyone to borrow, imitate, publish 
or copy wholesale. Almost the entire current scanning effort by American 
libraries is aimed at this 15 percent. The Million Book Project mines this 
small sliver of the pie, as does Google. Because they are in the commons, 
no law hinders this 15 percent from being scanned and added to the 
universal library.

The approximately 10 percent of all books actively in print will also be 
scanned before long. Amazon carries at least four million books, which 
includes multiple editions of the same title. Amazon is slowly scanning all 
of them. Recently, several big American publishers have declared themselves 
eager to move their entire backlist of books into the digital sphere. Many 
of them are working with Google in a partnership program in which Google 
scans their books, offers sample pages (controlled by the publisher) to 
readers and points readers to where they can buy the actual book. No one 
doubts electronic books will make money eventually. Simple commercial 
incentives guarantee that all in-print and backlisted books will before 
long be scanned into the great library. That's not the problem.

The major problem for large publishers is that they are not certain what 
they actually own. If you would like to amuse yourself, pick an 
out-of-print book from the library and try to determine who owns its 
copyright. It's not easy. There is no list of copyrighted works. The 
Library of Congress does not have a catalog. The publishers don't have an 
exhaustive list, not even of their own imprints (though they say they are 
working on it). The older, the more obscure the work, the less likely a 
publisher will be able to tell you (that is, if the publisher still exists) 
whether the copyright has reverted to the author, whether the author is 
alive or dead, whether the copyright has been sold to another company, 
whether the publisher still owns the copyright or whether it plans to 
resurrect or scan it. Plan on having a lot of spare time and patience if 
you inquire. I recently spent two years trying to track down the copyright 
to a book that led me to Random House. Does the company own it? Can I 
reproduce it? Three years later, the company is still working on its 
answer. The prospect of tracking down the copyright — with any certainty — 
of the roughly 25 million orphaned books is simply ludicrous.

Which leaves 75 percent of the known texts of humans in the dark. The legal 
limbo surrounding their status as copies prevents them from being 
digitized. No one argues that these are all masterpieces, but there is 
history and context enough in their pages to not let them disappear. And if 
they are not scanned, they in effect will disappear. But with copyright 
hyperextended beyond reason (the Supreme Court in 2003 declared the law 
dumb but not unconstitutional), none of this dark library will return to 
the public domain (and be cleared for scanning) until at least 2019. With 
no commercial incentive to entice uncertain publishers to pay for scanning 
these orphan works, they will vanish from view. According to Peter 
Brantley, director of technology for the California Digital Library, "We 
have a moral imperative to reach out to our library shelves, grab the 
material that is orphaned and set it on top of scanners."

No one was able to unravel the Gordian knot of copydom until 2004, when 
Google came up with a clever solution. In addition to scanning the 15 
percent out-of-copyright public-domain books with their library partners 
and the 10 percent in-print books with their publishing partners, Google 
executives declared that they would also scan the 75 percent out-of-print 
books that no one else would touch. They would scan the entire book, 
without resolving its legal status, which would allow the full text to be 
indexed on Google's internal computers and searched by anyone. But the 
company would show to readers only a few selected sentence-long snippets 
from the book at a time. Google's lawyers argued that the snippets the 
company was proposing were something like a quote or an excerpt in a review 
and thus should qualify as a "fair use."

Google's plan was to scan the full text of every book in five major 
libraries: the more than 10 million titles held by Stanford, Harvard 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/harvard_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
Oxford, the University of Michigan 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_michigan/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
and the New York Public Library. Every book would be indexed, but each 
would show up in search results in different ways. For out-of-copyright 
books, Google would show the whole book, page by page. For the in-print 
books, Google would work with publishers and let them decide what parts of 
their books would be shown and under what conditions. For the dark orphans, 
Google would show only limited snippets. And any copyright holder (author 
or corporation) who could establish ownership of a supposed orphan could 
ask Google to remove the snippets for any reason.

At first glance, it seemed genius. By scanning all books (something only 
Google had the cash to do), the company would advance its mission to 
organize all knowledge. It would let books be searchable, and it could 
potentially sell ads on those searches, although it does not do that 
currently. In the same stroke, Google would rescue the lost and forgotten 
75 percent of the library. For many authors, this all-out campaign was a 
salvation. Google became a discovery tool, if not a marketing program. 
While a few best-selling authors fear piracy, every author fears obscurity. 
Enabling their works to be found in the same universal search box as 
everything else in the world was good news for authors and good news for an 
industry that needed some. For authors with books in the publisher program 
and for authors of books abandoned by a publisher, Google unleashed a 
chance that more people would at least read, and perhaps buy, the creation 
they had sweated for years to complete.

*6. The Case Against Google*

Some authors and many publishers found more evil than genius in Google's 
plan. Two points outraged them: the virtual copy of the book that sat on 
Google's indexing server and Google's assumption that it could scan first 
and ask questions later. On both counts the authors and publishers accused 
Google of blatant copyright infringement. When negotiations failed last 
fall, the Authors Guild and five big publishing companies sued Google. 
Their argument was simple: Why shouldn't Google share its ad revenue (if 
any) with the copyright owners? And why shouldn't Google have to ask 
permission from the legal copyright holder before scanning the work in any 
case? (I have divided loyalties in the case. The current publisher of my 
books is suing Google to protect my earnings as an author. At the same 
time, I earn income from Google Adsense ads placed on my blog.)

One mark of the complexity of this issue is that the publishers suing were, 
and still are, committed partners in the Google Book Search Partner 
Program. They still want Google to index and search their in-print books, 
even when they are scanning the books themselves, because, they say, search 
is a discovery tool for readers. The ability to search the scans of all 
books is good for profits.

The argument about sharing revenue is not about the three or four million 
books that publishers care about and keep in print, because Google is 
sharing revenues for those books with publishers. (Google says publishers 
receive the "majority share" of the income from the small ads placed on 
partner-program pages.) The argument is about the 75 percent of books that 
have been abandoned by publishers as uneconomical. One curious fact, of 
course, is that publishers only care about these orphans now because Google 
has shifted the economic equation; because of Book Search, these dark books 
may now have some sparks in them, and the publishers don't want this 
potential revenue stream to slip away from them. They are now busy digging 
deep into their records to see what part of the darkness they can declare 
as their own.

The second complaint against Google is more complex. Google argues that it 
is nearly impossible to track down copyright holders of orphan works, and 
so, it says, it must scan those books first and only afterward honor any 
legitimate requests to remove the scan. In this way, Google follows the 
protocol of the Internet. Google scans all Web pages; if it's on the Web, 
it's scanned. Web pages, by default, are born copyrighted. Google, 
therefore, regularly copies billions of copyrighted pages into its index 
for the public to search. But if you don't want Google to search your Web 
site, you can stick some code on your home page with a no-searching sign, 
and Google and every other search engine will stay out. A Web master thus 
can opt out of search. (Few do.) Google applies the same principle of 
opting-out to Book Search. It is up to you as an author to notify Google if 
you don't want the company to scan or search your copyrighted material. 
This might be a reasonable approach for Google to demand from an author or 
publisher if Google were the only search company around. But search 
technology is becoming a commodity, and if it turns out there is any money 
in it, it is not impossible to imagine a hundred mavericks scanning 
out-of-print books. Should you as a creator be obliged to find and notify 
each and every geek who scanned your work, if for some reason you did not 
want it indexed? What if you miss one?

There is a technical solution to this problem: for the search companies to 
compile and maintain a common list of no-scan copyright holders. A 
publisher or author who doesn't want a work scanned notifies the keepers of 
the common list once, and anyone conducting scanning would have to remove 
material that was listed. Since Google, like all the other big search 
companies — Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo — is foremost a technical-solution 
company, it favors this approach. But the battle never got that far.

*7. When Business Models Collide*

In thinking about the arguments around search, I realized that there are 
many ways to conceive of this conflict. At first, I thought that this was a 
misunderstanding between people of the book, who favor solutions by laws, 
and people of the screen, who favor technology as a solution to all 
problems. Last November, the New York Public Library (one of the "Google 
Five") sponsored a debate between representatives of authors and publishers 
and supporters of Google. I was tickled to see that up on the stage, the 
defenders of the book were from the East Coast and the defenders of the 
screen were from the West Coast. But while it's true that there's a strand 
of cultural conflict here, I eventually settled on a different framework, 
one that I found more useful. This is a clash of business models.

Authors and publishers (including publishers of music and film) have relied 
for years on cheap mass-produced copies protected from counterfeits and 
pirates by a strong law based on the dominance of copies and on a public 
educated to respect the sanctity of a copy. This model has, in the last 
century or so, produced the greatest flowering of human achievement the 
world has ever seen, a magnificent golden age of creative works. Protected 
physical copies have enabled millions of people to earn a living directly 
from the sale of their art to the audience, without the weird dynamics of 
patronage. Not only did authors and artists benefit from this model, but 
the audience did, too. For the first time, billions of ordinary people were 
able to come in regular contact with a great work. In Mozart's day, few 
people ever heard one of his symphonies more than once. With the advent of 
cheap audio recordings, a barber in Java could listen to them all day long.

But a new regime of digital technology has now disrupted all business 
models based on mass-produced copies, including individual livelihoods of 
artists. The contours of the electronic economy are still emerging, but 
while they do, the wealth derived from the old business model is being 
spent to try to protect that old model, through legislation and 
enforcement. Laws based on the mass-produced copy artifact are being taken 
to the extreme, while desperate measures to outlaw new technologies in the 
marketplace "for our protection" are introduced in misguided righteousness. 
(This is to be expected. The fact is, entire industries and the fortunes of 
those working in them are threatened with demise. Newspapers and magazines, 
Hollywood, record labels, broadcasters and many hard-working and wonderful 
creative people in those fields have to change the model of how they earn 
money. Not all will make it.)

Kevin Kelly is the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine and author of "Out 
of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic 
World" and other books. He last wrote for the magazine about digital music.


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