Going back to the Guardian article, the author discusses something
different. He talks about how Google was intending to simply *delete*
all of Google Video, a huge resource that people have relied on for a
few years now. Google decided not to delete it only when people started
complaining. Their reasoning was that they wanted to concentrate on
"search" instead of hosting content--a rather strange reason that I
suspect may betray more intentions, since Google has been buying up all
kinds of hosting resources for several years.
The author compared this with Google Books, saying that based on such
reasoning, a private profit-making corporation could not be trusted with
such an incredible resource. As he says,
"As a private sector company, the core aim of Google is to make money.
The Google Videos situation shows that in order to lower expenditure and
adjust its priorities, Google was willing to delete content entrusted to
it by users. Libraries have trusted Google with millions of documents:
many of the books scanned by Google are not digitised or OCR-processed
anywhere else and, with budgets for university libraries shrinking year
after year, may not be digitised again any time in the near future.
Google acted admirably by listening to users and working to save the
videos but entrusting such vast cultural archives to a body that has no
explicit responsibilities to protection, archiving and public cultural
welfare is inherently dangerous: as the situation made clear, private
sector bodies have the ability to destroy archives at a whim."
Naturally, the long-term purpose of the Google Books project was for
Google to make money, not from any altruistic motives. They do *not* do
it all for us. ;-) If it looks as if they will not make money, it will
wind up being a drain and what will happen to the project? That is why I
mentioned the absolute need from Google's viewpoint (and unfortunately,
our viewpoint necessarily) to monetize the book project somehow. While I
haven't read anything, it wouldn't surprise me if Google is pinching
pennies now along with everybody else in this down economy. If it were
bad enough, Google would probably be willing to jettison some of their
holdings (is that the idea of closing down Google Video?), including
selling the book scans, but if those scans are illegal, they cannot be
sold. As my father would have said, it's like spending money on a dead
horse. It's a real dilemma for Google but the main losers would be us,
the public.
Sooner or later, the books in our libraries will become available
electronically because as people become more and more used to accessing
materials electronically, the more distasteful they will find the labor,
the wait, and the general hassle of getting a physical book to be able
to hold in their hands for only a couple of weeks. The non-electronic
materials will slowly begin to go ignored, just as happened before, when
the texts in manuscripts that were not printed were ignored and
forgotten. It would be a genuine tragedy for our entire civilization if
the scans are not made available.
By the way, while I very much appreciate HathiTrust, I cannot download
the public domain books and place them on my ebook reader. I must read
them one page at a time on my computer, which I will not do. I discussed
this in a blog entry earlier.
http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/2010/03/observations-of-bookman-on-his-initial.html
Therefore, I look for a downloadable version on either Google Books, or
I prefer the scans at the Internet Archive. There are lots of other
sites out there with some excellent book scans, though.
--
James L. Weinheimer weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
Cooperative Cataloging Rules: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
Received on Wed Apr 27 2011 - 11:50:20 EDT