Google Library book-scanning project scores

Google has so many irons in the fire that it is not always easy to keep track of its projects.  This is definitely not the case of the Google Library project, which proposes to scan the content of great libraries of the world and make them accessible to on-line search.

This project was controversial even before it was announced in December 2004. The company had been immediately sued for breach of copyright by a number of US authors and two well-known US trade groups: the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild. From there, the controversy reached a global level and the project was declared a transatlantic casus belli by French President Jacques Chirac himself. He proclaimed it an example of US cultural imperialism, which had to be contained and counterbalanced. He enlisted in his crusade the French National Library, whose head, a French academic and politician, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, deemed the topic important enough to write a book about it: “Quand Google défie l'Europe” (When Google is defying Europe). The French Library proposed an alternative project, the European Digital Library, which, after receiving official support from the French government, was submitted to the European Commission, It, in turn, set up a High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries and proposed to launch a Digital Libraries initiative.

Nevertheless Google has persevered, with apparently conclusive results. On August 9, the company announced that the University of California system, with its 100 libraries, is joining the project, which can already rely on books from libraries of Stanford, Michigan and Harvard. Altogether, some 25 to 30 million books should be accessible to full text on line search under the project. This is not the Universal Library project that many critics have both feared and hoped for but it should, according to Hal Varian, Professor of Economics at University of California at Berkeley (and Google’s advisor) “allow people to make much more effective use of material currently available only in libraries, making it more accessible and useful to us and to all future generations.”

In an economic analysis of the project, Varian argues that Google’s model, which accesses the full-text of both copyrighted and non-copyrighted material but varies the display of search results as a function of the copyright terms, is vastly superior to a model that would require separate permissions for copyrighted material. Participating libraries apparently agree with this argument.

It remains to be seen whether US courts will share this view. So far the trade groups continue to stick to their guns.

As for Europe, the first meeting of the High Level Expert Group was held in March 2006. Interestingly enough, the head of Google Europe is a member of the group. And the speed of implementation of the European Digital Initiative is very much in line with the usual pace of Commission work: the Commission promised both a Recommendation and a Communication for this year. These should provide more information about the proposed implementation timetable.

All hope to stop Google’s juggernaut is not lost however: the US version of the Jeanneney book, under a considerably less polemical title than its French original: “Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: a View from Europe”, is coming out under the University of Chicago imprint in November 2006.