Open Access News

Google & Books: An Exchange, letters to the editor of the New York Review of Books in response to Robert Darnton's article, Google and the Future of Books, NYRB, February 12, 2009 (blogged here in January).  The new exchange includes Darnton's response.  Excerpt:

From Paul Courant:

...[Darnton's] utopian vision of a digital infrastructure for a new Republic of Letters makes the spirit soar. But his idea that congressional committees beholden to Hollywood might have implemented that vision is a utopian fantasy, while his description of what will happen as a result of Google's scanning of copyrighted works is a dystopian fantasy.

At the heart of Darnton's dystopia about the Google settlement is his view that "Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly...of access to information." But Google doesn't have anything like a monopoly over access to the information in the books that are subject to the terms of the settlement. For a start (and of stunning public benefit in itself), up to 20 percent of the content of the books will be freely available on the Internet, and all of the content will be indexed and searchable. Moreover, Google is required to provide the familiar "find it in a library" link for all books offered commercially as a result of the settlement. That is, if after reading 20 percent of a book a user wants more and finds the price of online access to be excessive, the reader will be shown a list of libraries (ordered by proximity) that have the book, and can visit one of those libraries or employ interlibrary loan. This greatly weakens the market power of Google's product. Indeed, it is much better than the current state of affairs, in which users of Google Book Search can read only snippets, not 20 percent of a book, when deciding whether they have found what they seek....

[T]he market for current scientific literature has little in common with that for out-of-print monographs. The production of scholarship in the sciences requires reliable and immediate access to the current literature. One cannot publish, nor get grants, without such access. The publishers know it, and they price accordingly. In contrast, because there are many ways of getting access to most of the books sold by Google under the settlement, rapacious pricing won't work. The settlement requires "find it in a library" and extensive free preview, as well as a free access terminal in every public library building in the country. These features could not be more different than the business practices employed by many publishers of scientific, technical, and medical journals....

Of course I would prefer the universal library, but I am pretty happy about the universal bookstore....

From Ann Kjellberg (and six other literary executors to major authors):

...[A] period of exclusive control by a literary estate after an author's death creates the opportunity, and the financial incentive, to assemble fully prepared editions, made by specialists often informed by the author's instructions. Once work enters the public domain, it can be published by anyone in any form, and the financing of editions requiring editorial care becomes, once again, at the pleasure of benevolent institutions rather than readers.

As those of us involved in protecting authors' rights know, once work has been digitized, it becomes very difficult to control. In many places, and of many authors, it can be said that only a lingering affection for the book as an object sustains sales, since an author's works are so widely available electronically. Mass digitization will profoundly affect the viability of our system of copyright, and we need to ask, as not merely a parenthetical matter, how we will support creative work and the open exchange of ideas in its wake.

From Darnton's response:

I wish I could be convinced by Paul Courant's arguments, because I share his conviction that we need a digital infrastructure to support the twenty-first-century world of learning. Why then have I contracted a bad case of dystopia?

First, I worry about commercializing the content of our research libraries. True, there seems to be no alternative, because we have failed to finance large-scale digitization with public money. Google has the means, the skill, and the audacity to create a gigantic database by digitizing millions of books. I sympathize with those who say it is better that this database should exist, even if we will have to pay for access to it, than if it had never been created. What worries me is the fact that Google has no competitors.

Second, the class action character of the suit brought against Google by the authors and publishers means that no other enterprise could mount a rival digitizing operation, even if it could afford to do so, without striking deals with the copyright owners book by book, a virtual impossibility. True, this hypothetical, rival entrepreneur could attempt to cut a deal with the Book Rights Registry...[but] the settlement prohibits it from offering a competitor better terms than those accorded to Google....

Monopolies tend to charge monopoly prices. I agree that the parallel between the pricing of digital and periodical materials isn't perfect, but it is instructive. If the readers of a library become so attached to Google's database that they cannot do without it, the library will find it extremely difficult to resist stiff increases in the price for subscribing to it. As happened when the publishers of periodicals forced up their prices, the library may feel compelled to cover the increased cost by buying fewer books....

Moreover, Google's agreements with a number of large research libraries to digitize their collections preclude those libraries from mounting their own shared database that could compete with Google. According to the agreements, each library retains its own copy ("library digital copy") of works in its collection digitized by Google. But it does so under severe restrictions on use that prevent it both from making the digital file available for reading by its own members and from pooling these copies with those of other participating libraries in order to make them accessible to readers, either at a price or free of charge. Only Google will have control of the vast database of the libraries' combined collections....

Far from disputing the value of that access [Google will provide under the settlement], my concern is to guarantee it by modifying the proposed settlement in a way that will prevent exorbitant pricing. If that cannot be done, we may all become victims of what Paul Courant and I both deplore: "The American practice of making public policy by private lawsuit," as he correctly put it. In the end, when my dystopian temper gets the better of me, I fear that this practice will damage the world of learning by favoring private profit over the public good.