Early last week I read a pretty interesting piece by George Dyson called Turing’s Cathedral; it’s a summary of a talk he gave during a visit to Google HQ last month. Most of the article went over my head, but the quote he used to close the piece really struck a chord:
"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain." — Simon Ings, Headlong (1999)
Now where this gets fun for me is that Dyson didn’t fully attribute the quote – he just said "science fiction writer Simon Ings", but I wanted to know where it came from, so I found Simon’s website and I emailed him to ask where the quote came from.
He quickly wrote back that it came from his book Headlong, which is now out of print. That prompted me to ask him what his thoughts were as an author on the whole Google Print Book Search project.
His reply, reprinted here with his permission, was exactly what I would’ve expected from an author, and this is the second author who’s told me pretty much the same thing (the first was an academic writer):
I asked,
Your note about the OOP status of
Headlong prompts me to ask your opinion of the Google Print project,
in which they’re scanning copies of books both in and out of print w/o
permission of publishers or authors. It would seem that it could do
you no harm to have a copy of Headlong fully-searchable through Google
(they say they’ll not display the full text, but only a snippet around
the found text), and in fact if enough people found out about your
book that way it might even go back in print, which would be
beneficial to you. But that’s just my outsider’s opinion; do you have
one as an author?
And Simon replied,
An interesting question: are you involved in this debate? Your job
title suggests this is your bread and butter — or may become so.A lot of writers — and agents, incredibly — are running so scared of
services like GooglePrint, and I cannot for the life of me see why. My
shelves are crammed full of books – fiction and non-fiction – which I
found out about while using the Web for research. I don’t use Google
Print very much but I have recently used amazon.com’s ‘search inside’
function, and this is the closest experience to actual browsing I’ve
ever come across on-line.And it was, quite frankly, a delight: for us in the UK at the moment,
the bookshops are stocking fewer and fewer titles, so a good honest
browse is becoming a rare pleasure. Yet isn’t this how books get
discovered and read?For the past twenty years, the bookshops here have been relying on the
same tired formula to shift units: the ‘three for two’ bargain. They
have no innovation, no understanding of how readers find books, and no
interest in any but the major sellers. (This calamitous tunnel-vision
last year actually reduced the sales of major
sellers by a staggering 15%!). I don’t bother with bookshops any more.
Nor do many of the writers I know.I don’t know the detail, but I like the cut of GooglePrint’s jib, and
I know that they’ve been consulting with the book industry and
agencies over here to get the thing working without putting people’s
backs up.And its nice to see innovative companies actually thinking about books – something
bookshops haven’t done in my lifetime. So I think we should be
positively critical and make these services better where they need to
be better.The internet is, after all, where we go to find variety now – in
music, books, and much else. Without an on-line presence, the midlist
(which is to say, literature) is dead in the water.
and I replied, when asking for his permission to post our conversation,
Well I’m not officially involved in the debate in a way that
will influence it, but yes, all librarians are pretty interested in
what’s going on. Google claims altruistic intentions, in that they
"only want to make the world’s knowledge available to all" and that
they’re "creating the world’s largest card catalogue", and if that’s
true, then libraries will receive a pretty big gift because people
will suddenly know what’s in all those books we have. I personally
don’t think libraries have anything to fear from this initiative, but
that’s why your quote struck such a chord with me 🙂 . If Google has
other intentions (well of course they’re out to make money somehow),
it may still be an overall win for libraries.Your author’s response is exactly what I would have expected, and
what mine would be if I were an author. I too find the stance of the
publishers and associations bewildering – it can only be a knee-jerk
reaction to someone stepping on their turf. It’s
been shown in at least one
instance that making full text of books available online
actually increases print sales, and Amazon
found this too.Your notes about browsing (or not being able to) hit home for my
distance students as well, who are currently unable to browse our book
collection the way an on-campus student can. Google Print could
really level this playing field in distance education as well. It’ll
be an interesting next few years for both our businesses.
Yeah, I guess there’s the copyright question to be answered, but damn, it seems so obvious that this is good for authors, users, and libraries, and I don’t see how it’s harming the publishers either. Check out Sivacracy.net for the views of someone who’s paying more attention to the legal side of this issue.
And finally, I just found this page linked off the Google Book Search page – interesting how much more marketing / spin Google is forced to do with this project compared to all their other products!
Comments
3 Responses to “Opinions on Google Book Search”
Paul, your blog has just consumed my entire morning!
Until you brought it to my attention the whole furore around Google Print was coming to me muffled through the polite filters of various agencies. But it really is MAD out there, isn’t it? The various legal actions against Google seem particularly inept, although I don’t think Google helped themselves by citing ‘fair use’ in their ‘defence’.
Fair use — over here, anyway — has a much narrower definition than Google seems to think it has. A better argument may have been, ‘You don’t want us to quote snippets — what next? That’s like the music industry trying to ban whistling.’ Google’s indexing process amounts to no more than citation: no-one in their right mind would regard it as copyright infringement.
The worry, I suppose, is that Google has a fit and puts entire books up on its site without permission. This would certainly be an infringement! – but people who are worried about it (1) never thought about what a library does, (2) never thought about what a book is, and (3) never really understood where authors make their money (and it’s not off the out-of-print list, to be sure!).
The book industry suffers from cultural cringe: it wants to be the music industry. This blinds it to the fact that it is in a much healthier and more stable position than the music industry can ever be – because it makes tangible products, not ephemeral ones.
If digital print ever does mature (big if) and catch on (even bigger if), this changes the playing field, obviously. But I believe the book industry will still be in a strong position, because by then it will be able to buy a mature copy-control technology from the music industry. Let Sony make all the embarrassing mistakes first!
Enough. It’s clear that many better people have said just about everything there is to be said about the issue as it stands at the moment. (Meghann Marco’s blog entry was particularly apposite.) Incidentally my own publisher, Atlantic, says they’re in negotiations with Amazon.co.uk and nothing is going to happen straight away. This is probably healthy: there’s nothing the matter with caution.
It’s blind panic that’s so tiresome.
Bravo on your blog, Paul — and thanks for including our dialogue.
Simon.
Thanks Simon, Fair Use is more stringent here in Canada too (called Fair Dealing, and probably modeled after the British system, as so much is here 😉 I agree that the indexing is not something that’s worth challenging, but making an entire digital copy certainly is, and I think that’s what’s got some people up in arms. But times and technology and expectations change, and copyright law should change as appropriate too. I suspect this case, if it does make it to trial, will change copyright law, and I can only hope it’s for the better. Google’s pretty smart and I suspect they can afford better lawyers than the Publishers can, so I’m cautiously optimistic about the whole outcome. Time will tell.
If you want to spend even more time on the legal side of the issue, you could start here: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/google_print_debate_on_farbers.html
Hello. I have created a website I think you will find informative for yourself and your coworkers. It is a website designed to enhance your searching strategy on Google. It also gives you a brief overview of Google products that you may not be aware of. I hope you try out and tell a friend. Your friend from the Cleveland Public Library.
http://www.googlelibrarian.com