DW-world.de and other sources report, what the Bayrische Staatsbibliothek München announced on 6 March: a cooperation agreement with Google. The library sees this cooperation mainly in the light of preserving german cultural heritage. "It is a fascinating challenge to offer the rich literary tradition of germany to reades in the whole world" said Dr. Rolf Griebel, general director of the library. Books that are still under copyright will not be digitized, according to the press release.
This is certainly a slap in the face of those European intellectuals and politicians who used to accuse Google of "language imperialism". Maybe it would be more appropriate to accuse Google (or maybe computing science in general?) of "digital imperialism", that tendency to move everything away from "dead trees" to electro-magnetism.
Google's Book Search project has been also critisized by other bodies — the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sue Google for copyright infringement, Microsoft (who are also scanning books) accuses Google of making massive profits by exploiting authors and publishers.
In the US, Google is scanning all books of participating libraries and only taking down those whose copyright owners ask them to do so. However, this could be seen as legal under the fair use provisions, and the lawsuit against Google is still pending after 16 months in court. Microsoft's motivation is "about PR not a legal issue" — as even Microsoft employee Don Dodge notices in his blog.
Also, many of the publishers who are members of the AAP also have contracts with Google. Accordingly, when Google Book Search brings up a book of one of these publishers, it will also display adverts of the publisher and links to sites where users can buy the book.
So can the whole rhethoric about "culture" and "creativity" eventually be boild down to the simple question: who is making big bucks from "content creators", as this article seems to suggest? Could it be the case, that the traditional content industry is simply inefficient, with too few horses (creators) having to pull a cart with too many freeloaders (distributors)? Certainly this would explain why everybody is so keen to find new sources of revenue.
Every extra Euro (Pound, Kronor, …) earned has to be spent first. And it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince consumers to spend their money on "extras" of questionable value (such as the 9 extra tracks on the CD of which I only buy the one I want — from an online shop). It would be so much easier, if one could force consumers to pay for the extras. Yet it is silly to assume that consumers would not understand that game.
So I think it is time to review the business model of the content industry. Not that Google would have the silver bullet. Google is (mainly) big, it is present globally, it generates a lot of data, and it has this vision "to organize all the information in the world". Having the data on user behaviour gives Google that little bit of advantage over traditional players who rely much more on assumptions and second guesses. Aiming to organize all the information in the world makes Google quite a bit scary.
Yet, from an author's (and reader's) perspective, rather than a computer scientist's, a text is more than just "organized information". And indeed, also computer scientists acknowledge that and strive to put that part of the equation into a machine as well, but then that's what computer scientists do. And the "content industry" is waking up to this call, too. Just look at all these book-shops-cum-cafe-or-wine-bar for instance. However, there are still too many players looking back to the olden days, when writing and reading was not at an all year high, but CD sales were rocketing. As consumption (and creation) becomes more fragmented, traditional business models start to falter. Google seems to have understood at least some of this new game. It's time the content industry starts to reshape their role, too.
Acknowledgements: Writing this post I used sources I found on the Internet, such as the sources linked above, Wikipedia's article on Google Book Search, Google's Moon Shot, by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker, Thomas Caburn's article on Microsoft Attorney Accuses Google Of Copyright Violations, Nachrichten.ch, CPNB … and of course
