In a recent NY Times Op-Ed, James Gleick reports some great news about Google Book Search. Great, that is, for scholars.
If you are a scholar, you should already love Google Books for the huge number of public-domain books it has archived in full text. Printed texts were formerly resistant to the modern-world’s rapid research techniques, such as keyword searches. With Google Books, that’s no longer the case, opening up previously undreamed of possibilities for research in the history of scholarship.
But while the beauty of Google Book Search is that (a) it’s free, (b) it’s completely public, and (c) the scanned and digitized books they keep break the form of the static and linear printed book, it has also labored under a great limitation: copyright law. The protections of copyright law, and a several year old lawsuit against Google which was filed by the Author’s Guild, have limited public access to most of the titles it has already scanned. So while Google could show you search results in millions of books that exist in its database, it has chosen instead to keep these hidden while legal issues percolated.
No longer. Now, according to Gleick, Google has settled the Author’s Guild vs. Google Book Search lawsuit, in a way that will bring millions of interesting but out-of-print books back into the market.
Gleick in his own words:
By now [Google Books] has digitized at least seven million titles. Many are old enough to be in the public domain … and many are new enough to be available in bookstores, but the vast majority, four million to five million, are books that had fallen into a kind of limbo: protected by copyright but out of print. Their publishers had given up on them. They existed at libraries and used booksellers but otherwise had left the playing field.
As a way through the impasse, the [Authors Guild has] persuaded Google to do more than just scan the books for purposes of searching, but go further, by bringing them back to commercial life. Under the agreement these millions of out-of-print books return from limbo. Any money made from advertising or licensing fees will go partly to Google and mostly to the rights-holders. The agreement is nonexclusive: If competitors to Google want to get into the business, they can.
This means a new beginning — a vast trove of books restored to the marketplace. It also means that much of the book world is being upended before our eyes: the business of publishing, selling and distributing books; the role of libraries and bookstores; all uses of books for research, consultation, information storage; everything, in fact, but the plain act of reading a book from start to finish.