[xmca] NY Times article on Google Book Search

[Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>]

January 5, 2009
Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books

By MOTOKO RICH
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site  
and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the  
earliest use of the phrase “you’re not the boss of me.” Using a  
newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.

But while using Google’s book search recently, he found the phrase in  
a short story contained in “The Church,” a periodical published in  
1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

Ever since Google began scanning printed books four years ago,  
scholars and others with specialized interests have been able to tap a  
trove of information that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of  
libraries and in antiquarian bookstores.

According to Dan Clancy, the engineering director for Google book  
search, every month users view at least 10 pages of more than half of  
the one million out-of-copyright books that Google has scanned into  
its servers.

Google’s book search “allows you to look for things that would be very  
difficult to search for otherwise,” said Mr. Zimmer, whose site is  
visualthesaurus.com.

A settlement in October with authors and publishers who had brought  
two copyright lawsuits against Google will make it possible for users  
to read a far greater collection of books, including many still under  
copyright protection.

The agreement, pending approval by a judge this year, also paved the  
way for both sides to make profits from digital versions of books.  
Just what kind of commercial opportunity the settlement represents is  
unknown, but few expect it to generate significant profits for any  
individual author. Even Google does not necessarily expect the book  
program to contribute significantly to its bottom line.

“We did not think necessarily we could make money,” said Sergey Brin,  
a Google founder and its president of technology, in a brief interview  
at the company’s headquarters. “We just feel this is part of our core  
mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a  
search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site.”

Revenue will be generated through advertising sales on pages where  
previews of scanned books appear, through subscriptions by libraries  
and others to a database of all the scanned books in Google’s  
collection, and through sales to consumers of digital access to  
copyrighted books. Google will take 37 percent of this revenue,  
leaving 63 percent for publishers and authors.

The settlement may give new life to copyrighted out-of-print books in  
a digital form and allow writers to make money from titles that had  
been out of commercial circulation for years. Of the seven million  
books Google has scanned so far, about five million are in this  
category.

Even if Google had gone to trial and won the suits, said Alexander  
Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual  
property at the company, it would have won the right to show only  
previews of these books’ contents. “What people want to do is read the  
book,” Mr. Macgillivray said.

Users are already taking advantage of out-of-print books that have  
been scanned and are available for free download. Mr. Clancy was  
monitoring search queries recently when one for “concrete fountain  
molds” caught his attention. The search turned up a digital version of  
an obscure 1910 book, and the user had spent four hours perusing 350  
pages of it.

For scholars and others researching topics not satisfied by a  
Wikipedia entry, the settlement will provide access to millions of  
books at the click of a mouse. “More students in small towns around  
America are going to have a lot more stuff at their fingertips,” said  
Michael A. Keller, the university librarian at Stanford. “That is  
really important.”

When the agreement was announced in October, all sides hailed it as a  
landmark settlement that permitted Google to proceed with its scanning  
project while protecting the rights and financial interests of authors  
and publishers. Both sides agreed to disagree on whether the book  
scanning itself violated authors’ and publishers’ copyrights.

In the months since, all parties to the lawsuits — as well as those,  
like librarians, who will be affected by it — have had the opportunity  
to examine the 303-page settlement document and try to digest its  
likely effects.

Some librarians privately expressed fears that Google might charge  
high prices for subscriptions to the book database as it grows.  
Although nonprofit groups like the Open Content Alliance are building  
their own digital collections, no other significant private-sector  
competitors are in the business. In May, Microsoft ended its book  
scanning project, effectively leaving Google as a monopoly corporate  
player.

David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said the company wanted  
to push the book database to as many libraries as possible. “If the  
price gets too high,” he said, “we are simply not going to have  
libraries that can afford to purchase it.”

For readers who might want to buy digital access to an individual  
scanned book, Mr. Clancy said, Google was likely to sell at least half  
of the books for $5.99 or less. Students and faculty at universities  
who subscribe to the database will be able to get the full contents of  
all the books free.

For the average author, “this is not a game changer” in an economic  
sense, said Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American  
Publishers and president of the digital media investments group at  
Bertelsmann, the parent company of Random House, the world’s largest  
publisher of consumer books.

“They will get paid for the use of their book, but whether they will  
get paid so much that they can start living large — I think that’s  
just a fantasy,” Mr. Sarnoff said. “I think there will be a few  
authors who do see significant dollars out of this, but there will be  
a vast number of authors who see insignificant dollars out of this.”

But, he added, “a few hundred dollars for an individual author can  
equate to a considerable sum for a publisher with rights to 10,000  
books.”

So far, publishers that have permitted Google to offer searchable  
digital versions of their new in-print books have seen a small payoff.  
Macmillan, the company that owns publishing houses including Farrar,  
Straus & Giroux and St. Martin’s Press and represents authors  
including Jonathan Franzen and Janet Evanovich, offers 11,000 titles  
for search on Google. In 2007, Macmillan estimated that Google helped  
sell about 16,400 copies.

Authors view the possibility of readers finding their out-of-print  
books as a cultural victory more than a financial one.

“Our culture is not just Stephen King’s latest novel or the new Harry  
Potter book,” said James Gleick, a member of the board of the Authors  
Guild. “It is also 1,000 completely obscure books that appeal not to  
the one million people who bought the Harry Potter book but to 100  
people at a time.”

Some scholars worry that Google users are more likely to search for  
narrow information than to read at length. “I have to say that I think  
pedagogically and in terms of the advancement of scholarship, I have a  
concern that people will be encouraged to use books in this very  
fragmentary way,” said Alice Prochaska, university librarian at Yale.

Others said they thought readers would continue to appreciate long  
texts and that Google’s book search would simply help readers find them.

“There is no short way to appreciate Jane Austen, and I hope I’m right  
about that,” said Paul Courant, university librarian at the University  
of Michigan. “But a lot of reading is going to happen on screens. One  
of the important things about this settlement is that it brings the  
literature of the 20th century back into a form that the students of  
the 21st century will be able to find it.”

Google’s book search has already entered the popular culture, in the  
film version of “Twilight,” based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer  
about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire. Bella, one of  
the main characters, uses Google to find information about a local  
American Indian tribe. When the search leads her to a book, what does  
she do?

She goes to a bookstore and buys it.


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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