Google, the benevolent dictator of the interwebs, has undertaken a massive project to digitize and index all the world’s printed material under the Google Books platform. So far they’ve scanned over 10 million books, including those in the public domain and those still protected by copyright.
The cost of the scanning, an estimated $50 million so far, is far less than the cost of the copyright lawsuit settlements, an estimated $125 million so far. These figures don’t include the data storage cost of these millions of volumes, which can’t be cheap either. So why do it?
To protect the world’s cultural heritage? Books, by nature of their paper ingredients, make them attractive prey for fires. Google co-founder Sergey Brin points out the ancient Library of Alexandria burned down three times, and our own Library of Congress lost two-thirds of its collection in an 1851 fire. With today’s digital storage technology, don’t we owe it to posterity to preserve the accumulation of mankind’s writings?
While that’s an admirable goal and sounds nice in the press release, the truth is Google wouldn’t go through the trouble and expense if they didn’t plan on making money from the project.
Of course Google shows its bread-and-butter text ads next to all the book search results. Critics argue that its one thing to archive all the books of the world for future generations and for easy indexing online — the digital equivalent of a card catalog, right? — but quite another when you intend to profit off someone else’s copyrighted work. As part of one of Google’s legal settlements on the project, they’ve had to agree to generous revenue-sharing percentages with the authors and publishers.
Also in the works is a digital download e-store, which will likely compete with Amazon and their Kindle-books. No word yet if Google will develop their own reader hardware, or if the downloads will be in an open format to work on the Kindle and others.
I think it will be interesting to see how the Google Books project progresses.
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