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

Bryan Appleyard

The Sunday Times
January 21, 2007

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

Posted by Miriam V.