Google Books: Copyright Disaster or Digitization Pioneer?

 

In this digital age, the digitization of books and other materials is inevitable. Over the last decade, several projects aiming to do just this have risen to the challenge. Among them are private companies like Amazon’s Kindle project to more public projects such as Project Gutenberg. Both of these projects digitize books and other important resources but do so through two different methods: under copyright vs public domain. Google Books, on the other hand, operates under a combination of these two methods drawing equal amounts of praise and criticism.

Google books is an online site run by Google that gives users access to thousands of digitized books for free with the intention “to make the world of books more discoverable” (qtd. In Baksik 399). While this is an admirable goal the methods they have chosen to do it have caused an enormous amount of criticism and even lawsuits. First, much like Project Gutenberg, Google Books offers books whose copyrights have expired, making it a valuable resource for historians and students alike. Although as noted by historian Ronald Musto in his analysis of Google Books “Google Books Mutilates the Printed Past” some sources offered under the public domain were low quality with some pages “either skewed, blurred, swooshed, folded back, misplaced, or just plain missing”. With this in mind, these resources that would be incredibly valuable for students like myself, lose that value. 

The second method by which Google Books offers resources is by receiving permission from the author or through the Library Program. In this program, Google scans books from participating libraries and offers them up on the site, and then provides the library with a digital copy of the material in return. This is where the copyright issues come in. The large majority of the resources from this program are copyrighted sources, essentially taking these sources without the author's permission and offering them to the public with only a small amount of ad money offered in return. This has since resulted in two lawsuits and an incredible amount of criticism.

So while the project has good intentions and is furthering current strides in technology and access within the library, its process and methods have much to be desired. Hopefully, in the near future, other pursers of digitization can learn from the mistakes of Google Books and make a resource that is both valuable and ethical. 

Works Cited 

Baksik, Corinna. "Fair Use or Exploitation? The Google Book Search Controversy." portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 6 no. 4, 2006, p. 399-415. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pla.2006.0047.

Musto, Ronald G. “Google Books Mutilates the Printed Past.” Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 55, no. 39, June 2009. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.palomar.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ847410&site=ehost-live&scope=site.