"...here is a proposal that could result in the world's largest library. It would, to be sure, be a digital library, but it could dwarf the Library of Congress and all the national libraries of Europe" (11).
"Google could also become the world's largest book business--not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon" (11).
The above quotes are in an article I just read entitled "Google & the Future of Books" by Robert
Darnton in the February 12, 2009 issue of
The New York Review of Books. This article has astounding implications for the future of how libraries might work and the future of how we access copyrighted materials.
In the article,
Darnton takes readers through a detour of past ideas about access to information and intellectual citizenship. He invokes ideals and motifs of
Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Denis Diderot and the overall power of access to knowledge. He makes references to Diderot's
Encyclopedie, and how the later published
Encyclopedie Methodique divided knowledge into fields that eventually evolved into the departmentalization of knowledge into the various discourses that we understand today.
Darnton continues tracing this evolution--showing that in the eighteenth century, professionalization became necessary for universities. The discourses became more specific and required experts in
subfields of a discourse. As we know, time passes and the
subfields divide into more
subfields, until there are
subfields of
subfields. The real significance of this to
Darnton's article is that Diderot and the
Enlightenment thinkers were looking for an all-inclusive resource at the creation of the
Encyclopedie--up until recently, the modern-day equivalent of this all-inclusive resource has been the library. And as more professions were created for more
subfields within discourses, a greater demand for specific and new publications was created.
Darnton asserts that the dilemma of the library to be a "temple of learning" was complicated tremendously by the commercialization of subscriptions of professional journals. With more
subfields comes more subscriptions, and if there is only one place to get that subscription, the library must pay for the resources, especially if professors and students fervently demand the resources. If the businesses increase the price of subscription, the library must follow suit. This is a grave problem, but it is a
pre-
internet,
pre-Google problem.
In September and October of 2005, as
Darnton points out, this complicated process of the commercial industry controlling the access of information becomes even more complicated as authors and publishers brought forth a class-action suit against Google and claimed that Google was violating copyright laws by digitizing books intended for the Google Book Search function. Apparently a settlement between the two parties is underway but is subject to approval by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The settlement involves the creation of something entitled the Book Rights Registry in which will "represent the interest of the copyright holders" (10). Google will then sell access to an enormous data bank of materials to universities, colleges, and schools under an "institutional license," to libraries under a "public access license," and to consumers under a "consumer license." Therefore, Google will have the right to determine the price of the licenses, and thus, the price of subscription problem that
Darnton mentions earlier has now found its way into the digitized realm.
One of the really important parts of this settlement is that "the class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition. Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one." Therefore, Google has a monopolizing opportunity over the accessibility of US copyrighted information in the digitized form. The hope is that Google maintains a
responsible and civil attitude toward its legal control of this matter. It is unlikely that Google will ever create an
Encyclopedie for free access (although technology now permits us to do so), but one hopes that this transformation of information access will have a positive effect.
Read more here:
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/***Please keep in mind. This is my
interpretation of Robert
Darnton's article, which is very recent. I have missed some key elements of the article, and I understand that. I encourage you to pay for a copy of this month's
New York Review and read it yourselves.***
