I’ve fallen behind again! That’s what I get for taking a real weekend, I suppose. Catching up, and hopefully progress on this whole Gaming the System thing in the near future. In the meantime…

I went to a debate about Google Book Search last night, hosted by the LA Public Library. I won’t even begin to dig in to the complicated issues surrounding the project, whose goal is to scan and index every book they can get their hands on and make it all searchable via Google, with full texts available online for public domain books and snippets for in-copyright books. The battle is thus: the in-print books have been negotiated with publishers, and the public domain books are, obviously, in the public domain, so the issue is over the in-copyright but out-of-print books, which Larry Lessig says is about 75% of published material.

Last night it seemed obvious to me that the battle isn’t going to be won anytime soon - it’s both ideological and semantic, and the two sides are speaking different languages and operating on different assumptions. That’s problematic to me, because it means that we won’t be compromising or agreeing on anything anytime soon, and, well, I’m personally unwilling to let this debate hold up human progress in my lifetime.

Alan Adler, from the Association of American Publishers, seemed obsessed with economics and kept beating the “Google is a for-profit company” drum, outright stating that their intentions are purely profit-oriented, and, implying that profit was somehow antithetical to doing something good or useful for society as a whole. I’ll concede that keeping the database proprietary is only happening because Google needs it to make money, but Adler dodged the point that an audience member made that, well, Google would incur great cost for building the database, and, hence, should be able to recoup that cost.

The fact that the publishers didn’t figure in this picture seemed audacious to him, but for out of print books, well, isn’t that just like making fine art out of trash? No one would expect you to pay residuals to the dump. Alan said several times that the publishers would have gotten around to building something similar eventually, and that we shouldn’t be trumpeting technology over economics. First of all, don’t tell me it would have been open-source if they had built it - he just ruined his own argument. Second, that’s exactly the same argument the film and television industries used to justify their dying business models. And third, this is too important - we’re unwilling to wait.

Someone in the audience brought up Napster, and how that books wouldn’t be widely pirated because no one wants to read 300 pages on a screen. Well, the Sony eReader solves that problem. No, I think the reason it hasn’t happened is that it’s expensive (in time or money) to scan a book, whereas ripping a CD is cheap. The fact of the matter is, the market is long-overdue for searchable, linkable books. We’ve seen that piracy explodes only when the commercial market fails to provide users with their content in the forms and places they want it. eReader or not, if the publishers won’t allow people searchable digital books, the market will create a solution. The publishing industry has had fair warning, but if they don’t act, we will see the Napsterization of books sooner rather than later. I predict this will happen within a decade, at which point throw-away print material (like magazines) will almost all be digital, formats will be stabilized, and (if there’s no other way) someone will produce an under-$100 machine that can scan an entire book in minutes.

Most importantly, though, is that this project is vital to human progress. If Google were to take the moral high ground - that having a searchable index of all published books is integral to our culture - they could easily win. It wipes out the petty squabbling over copyright and residuals because arguing against making books more useful is like arguing against intelligence. It’s nonsensical, and the AAP knows it.

Alan refused to answer the question as to how the AAP would feel if the project were done by a public agency in an open format. This is purely theoretical, because it would cost so much that the only motivation to undertake such a project would be profit, something which the AAP conveniently sidesteps, not seeing the urgency of the matter. He dodged the issue because they would still oppose it, but then their purely monetary motivations would be exposed as the petty greed that it is. I have no doubt that if libraries did not exist, the AAP would staunchly oppose their creation.

This is where the big cleft is, in my view: the AAP is stuck in an old economic model, where everything of value must be monetized. Google creates much wealth (in the abstract, societal sense) for free and also makes a profit. Why should Book Seach be different? It would make one of the ultimate sources of intellectual wealth available to all internet users, and for that they would begrudge them contextual ads to recoup their cost and turn a profit? It’s petty jealousy and clinging to old business models, is all.

Many people, myself included, are unwilling to let this important development in the history of human culture slip another decade, let alone our whole lifetimes, over silly legal restrictions. They may be able to prevent Google from doing it (publicly, at least), but books will be digitized one way or the other, even if it takes a Book Torrent to do it.

Update: Google just launched a Shakespeare landing page inside of Book Search, which gives you free, searchable access to the entirety of the Bard’s plays, in multiple editions (no sonnets yet, it appears). What a great way to prove the usefulness and incredible value of this project. If it catches on with students, I imagine this could go a long way toward boosting public opinion on the matter. [via TechCrunch]