Two Mondays of Books! This week: why the near future for books is all online and all-Google. Next week: a bunch of great sites from Google Scholar to BookMooch to Madame Bovary in your Inbox, courtesy of DailyLit.
My TESOL instructors were fond of saying – for reasons only they understand – that there are no books on the web! There are, of course, thousands of books available for free download and scores of publishers opening up their books to Google’s BookSearch and a mountain or two of useful and cool information about books. All of the above can be useful to teachers. And teachers better get used to more and more books starting and staying online and never seeing paper because the bookscape is inexorably changing.
Books may be the single most valuable artefact of civilization – next to non-fat plain yogurt and a Bialetti coffee machine. Something so important doesn’t deserve our nostalgia. Somewhere at sometime in every situation…somebody is reading a book, or, at least, a part of a book. Books make the world go round but, like fruit, they’re a gamble (to quote from Seinfeld.) Even a paperback costs $20; so only the financially-relaxed folks of the middle-class are going to be regular bookbuyers, sadly. It’s even more regrettable when you think what an incredible bargain a book is as entertainment. If movies were as good, they’d cost about two bucks!
The dream to make such an important cultural tool more accessible and more affordable is worthwhile. So a flood of gadgets, both hardware and software, pours forth on a regular basis. The specialized hardware seems unnecessary to me. The New York Times recently hyped a bunch of new gadgets but it all ended up sounding like flabby ad copy or wishful thinking. The best line belonged to a New Jersey lawyer who
“…takes his cellphone to bed with him. ‘If I’m reading in bed and I don’t want to wake up my wife, I can use my phone and read in total darkness,’ he said.”
This seems to be the tone of the tech side of bookworld; if you can’t simply eliminate the painfully slow reading aspect of books, you can at least turn it into a kind of low-energy extreme sport to be performed in total darkness. This is what infuriates the real book people, of course, and correctly so. Alan Wall, writing a guest column in Mark Thwaite’s wonderful book site, ReadySteadyBook, told the story of encountering one of the deadly new book geeks:
This particular enthusiast for all things speedy, simultaneous and multi-tasking, anything that flashed and bleeped and interfaced, appeared to have no interest whatsoever in what I in my quaintness still call knowledge and learning. He was a representative of that new and potent ideology which claims that it is not the internalisation of knowledge that should be the aim of education, simply the acquisition of techniques for effectively accessing it. In other words, the skills do not have to be ‘learnt’, simply located, downloaded, then stored for future use. As long as a student can find where the knowledge lies, and process it for the task presently in hand, then that, it would appear, is acceptable. This is cant, and dangerous cant too. I would like to explain why.
Real learning modifies the human being who undergoes it. We change; we grow; we see reality differently. If we don’t, then we have not, in fact, learnt: we have merely skimmed the surface of a learning subject. Learning is participatory…
All of which sounds right to me. But, like the over-enthusiastic geek, the over-protective Professor Wall wants to turn the book-lined library into the Alamo (or whatever the Brit version is); he claims the book empowers students because a book enables students to turn the pages themselves as opposed to those nasty computers that keep locking us into PowerPoint presentations. An idea that doesn’t click with the Prof is that electronic information is easier to store and search and reference. If he would come clean, I think he’d admit that he simply likes the smell of books better than the silicone scent of his laptop! In this, I agree wholeheartedly.
While Old Book fights with New Book, sales keep dropping. The reasons are: the TV is easier to succumb to; the wider public has less disposable cash; and our high schools are turning out half their ‘graduates’ who are unable to really read.
Into the twitch & bitch of books, rides Google. It’s not surprising they’re interested in books; I’m not sure when the back-of-book index was first invented but we are clearly ready for an upgrade. And Google has not been shy. Book Search assumes the entire history of written communication is just a part of the web that’s slightly more difficult to access. By copying all the books that exist, the Library Project is designed to make the access much easier. Google Scholar is trying to do the same thing with all the scholary literature hidden away in journals.
Publishers are like ostriches except they are noisier - and they own copyrights. From the beginning, they have hidden from technical change while complaining loudly in response to Google’s argument that making all the material more available would help to promote it. I’m sure the publishers would feel better if they could somehow see a familiar cash register midst all the advanced optimism. The astonishing thing is this: Google is slowly convincing people. As recently as 2005, RandomHouse was suing, now they are signing up to Book Search. And they are not alone: the program now has 10,000 publishers and 27 academic reference libraries.
In spite of some bookpeople making tentative steps toward the future, I think the hassles are going to continue for Google; book people would rather bitch than twitch (see today’s NYT, for instance). However, we all can see where we are headed and, just for fun, let’s imagine how it might play out:
- Books on paper keep not selling so well.
- The big media conglomerates that own the publishers take a moment out from their problems with their recording companies where music is not selling so well and realize they don’t want to hear anymore bitching about books!
- Google’s stock, currently at $600, rises modestly to $1,200…then $1,800…
- Google buys the book industry. Aside from the convincing argument of giving the media companies a chance to own some Google stock, Google shows the oligopolistic publishing sector that if they were to buy one of the group, they could effectively set prices for the whole industry. So why not get everyone at the table and make them an offer they can’t refuse?
- Anti-trust? Google announces that if they are allowed to own the entire collected written works of mankind, they will make these things we once called ‘books’ available on-line for free! And, did we say that everything will be searchable?
- But what about the authors!!! Free books yield zero royalties. And when it comes to bitch, authors are heavyweights. But do you think it might be possible to interest authors in being included in the Google Stock Option Plan? Maybe.
Next week, some more-near-term fun: along with personal Google Book Searches and Google Scholar, I’ll take a look at things a teacher might do with Project Gutenberg, BookMooch, Goodreads, Rosetta: Books for Kids, DailyLit, Maud Newton and ReadySteadyBook.
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link
http://www.stephenbingham.com/2007/10/22/books-1-twitch-bitch-2/trackback/
October 23, 2007 at 11:59 am
Geoff B
Here’s an article from the NYT the other day about books on the net but Google does not look quite so good.
Geoff
By KATIE HAFNER
Published: October 22, 2007
Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.
The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.
Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.
Google pays to scan the books and does not directly profit from the resulting Web pages, although the books make its search engine more useful and more valuable. The libraries can have their books scanned again by another company or organization for dissemination more broadly.
It costs the Open Content Alliance as much as $30 to scan each book, a cost shared by the group’s members and benefactors, so there are obvious financial benefits to libraries of Google’s wide-ranging offer, started in 2004.
Many prominent libraries have accepted Google’s offer — including the New York Public Library and libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.
But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions.
Even though Google’s program could make millions of books available to hundreds of millions of Internet users for the first time, some libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that dominance for commercial gain.
“There are two opposed pathways being mapped out,” said Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.”
Last month, the Boston Library Consortium of 19 research and academic libraries in New England that includes the University of Connecticut and the University of Massachusetts, said it would work with the Open Content Alliance to begin digitizing the books among the libraries’ 34 million volumes whose copyright had expired.
“We understand the commercial value of what Google is doing, but we want to be able to distribute materials in a way where everyone benefits from it,” said Bernard A. Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library, which has in its collection roughly 3,700 volumes from the personal library of John Adams.
Mr. Margolis said his library had spoken with both Google and Microsoft, and had not shut the door entirely on the idea of working with them. And several libraries are working with both Google and the Open Content Alliance.
Adam Smith, project management director of Google Book Search, noted that the company’s deals with libraries were not exclusive. “We’re excited that the O.C.A. has signed more libraries, and we hope they sign many more,” Mr. Smith said.
“The powerful motivation is that we’re bringing more offline information online,” he said. “As a commercial company, we have the resources to do this, and we’re doing it in a way that benefits users, publishers, authors and libraries. And it benefits us because we provide an improved user experience, which then means users will come back to Google.”
The Library of Congress has a pilot program with Google to digitize some books. But in January, it announced a project with a more inclusive approach. With $2 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the library’s first mass digitization effort will make 136,000 books accessible to any search engine through the Open Content Alliance. The library declined to comment on its future digitization plans.
The Open Content Alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, which was created in 1996 with the aim of preserving copies of Web sites and other material. The group includes more than 80 libraries and research institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution.
Although Google is making public-domain books readily available to individuals who wish to download them, Mr. Kahle and others worry about the possible implications of having one company store and distribute so much public-domain content.
“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity,” Mr. Kahle said.
The Open Content Alliance, he said, “is fundamentally different, coming from a community project to build joint collections that can be used by everyone in different ways.”
Mr. Kahle’s group focuses on out-of-copyright books, mostly those published in 1922 or earlier. Google scans copyrighted works as well, but it does not allow users to read the full text of those books online, and it allows publishers to opt out of the program.
Microsoft joined the Open Content Alliance at its start in 2005, as did Yahoo, which also has a book search project. Google also spoke with Mr. Kahle about joining the group, but they did not reach an agreement.
A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines other than Microsoft’s.
“Unlike Google, there are no restrictions on the distribution of these copies for academic purposes across institutions,” said Jay Girotto, group program manager for Live Book Search from Microsoft. Institutions working with Microsoft, he said, include the University of California and the New York Public Library.
Some in the research field view the issue as a matter of principle.
Doron Weber, a program director at the Sloan Foundation, which has made several grants to libraries for digital conversion of books, said that several institutions approached by Google have spoken to his organization about their reservations. “Many are hedging their bets,” he said, “taking Google money for now while realizing this is, at best, a short-term bridge to a truly open universal library of the future.”
The University of Michigan, a Google partner since 2004, does not seem to share this view. “We have not felt particularly restricted by our agreement with Google,” said Jack Bernard, a lawyer at the university.
The University of California, which started scanning books with the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft and Yahoo in 2005, has added Google. Robin Chandler, director of data acquisitions at the University of California’s digital library project, said working with everyone helps increase the volume of the scanning.
Some have found Google to be inflexible in its terms. Tom Garnett, director of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a group of 10 prominent natural history and botanical libraries that have agreed to digitize their collections, said he had had discussions with various people at both Google and Microsoft.
“Google had a very restrictive agreement, and in all our discussions they were unwilling to yield,” he said. Among the terms was a requirement that libraries put their own technology in place to block commercial search services other than Google, he said.
Libraries that sign with the Open Content Alliance are obligated to pay the cost of scanning the books. Several have received grants from organizations like the Sloan Foundation.
The Boston Library Consortium’s project is self-funded, with $845,000 for the next two years. The consortium pays 10 cents a page to the Internet Archive, which has installed 10 scanners at the Boston Public Library. Other members include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University.
The scans are stored at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and are available through its Web site. Search companies including Google are free to point users to the material.
On Wednesday the Internet Archive announced, together with the Boston Public Library and the library of the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, that it would start scanning out-of-print but in-copyright works to be distributed through a digital interlibrary loan system.