Google Re-Writes the Books - A Publishing Revolution?

A recent episode of the ABC Bookshow 'Google deal sparks publishing revolution' (listen, download [7.3MB]) highlighted many issues raised by Google's digitization of millions of publications.

It's been described as the biggest book deal in US publishing history. After two years of intense negotiations, America's book industry and the giant internet search engine Google have settled their copyright stoush for AU$195 million Five major American publishers and the Authors Guild took legal action against Google for scanning copyrighted works without permission. They've now settled their differences in a New York court. So what does this historic settlement mean for the Australian, and International book industry?

Google has said that they are scanning more than 3,000 books per day, a rate that translates into more than 1 million annually, the entire project may exceed $200 million. As of March 2007, The New York Times reported that Google has already digitized one million volumes at an estimated cost of $7 million.

On October 28, 2008 Google stated that they have 7 million books searchable through Google Book Search, including those scanned by their 20,000 publisher partners. Of the 7 million books, 1 million are "full preview" based on agreements with publishers. 1 million are in the public domain, and the remaining 5 million are no longer in print or commercially available.

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Many librarians are singing the praises of Google's innovation, citing the great accessibility to an online corpus of human knowledge, whereas the publishing industry and writers' groups have criticized the project's inclusion of snippets of copyrighted works as infringement.

I am reminded of the condition of the Ancient world, when parts of the world were in the 'Dark Ages' (termed so because of the lack of knowledge shared to many parts of the world - they were 'in the dark'), when to access credible academic or historic information one was required to physically travel to great libraries in Greece. Whats more many texts housed in these libraries were lost forever in fires caused by war or natural disasters.

Although I respect the author's reservations regarding the digitization and distribution of their works, from a student's point of view, I see the positive forces of accessibility to such a great volume of information as liberating.