A Writer’s Plea: Figure Out How to Preserve Google Books

[kristopher]

A Writer’s Plea: Figure Out How to Preserve Google Books

The dispute over Google Books continues to rage in the courts and op-ed pages of the country. There are legitimate questions about Google, profit sharing and privacy. But let’s not let the litigation obscure that Google Books provides an unprecedented and irreproducible service to its users.


I’m a science writer at Wired.com, but I’m also working on a book about the history of (what we now call) green technology. My book puts a topic front and center that has been hidden in the footnotes of the American energy story. And without Google Books, I’m not sure it would have been possible to write it. At the very least, my contribution to the book world would have been smaller and shallower.

The searchability, accessibility and breadth of the Google Books collection do not just portend some future best-ever digital library. It’s already the best resource for research that exists.

I’m not a traditional library- or book-hater. I’m a visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Office for the History of Science and Technology and have dozens of books checked out from the UC system. I smell the insides of old books for pleasure.

But traditional library digging is almost unbelievably inefficient ...

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/preserve-google-books/


I can't agree more strongly. It is morally indefenseable if we allow narrow issues of greed to derail this move to a digitized and searchable archive of knowledge.

[sandnsea]

1. I love Google Books

There's no reason anything that is not under copyright can't be online. I have found so much information on a variety of topics, including genealogy info. There's no reason for these books to not be online. Reading books is still a completely different experience.

[enlightenment]

2. I agree with a lot he says,

but the "It’s already the best resource for research that exists" is hyperbole. It's a great source; I use it all the time - but the 'best'? Please.

He spends half his article complaining about the process of doing deep research - ending each paragraph long complaint with some form of "oh, but I really love it" that sounds like he's just trying to avoid the accusation of laziness. It is still pretty clear that he really wants to accomplish all his research sitting on his couch with his computer on his lap.

Some information is never going to make it into a pure digital archive; he might actually have to go to it, rather than it coming to him. Most archives (including the National Archives) are making great strides in digitizing information - not for ease of use as much as an attempt to preserve it for the future. Perhaps he should do some research into WHY archives have trouble getting the money and resources they need to digitize - in the process he might learn that some things cannot just be scanned and turned into PDFs.

Whinging complaints about it being hard are something that should come from teenagers, not a 'visiting scholar'. If he wants change, he should stop complaining and try doing a little research to figure out why it's not happening as quickly as he thinks it should.

[kristopher]

4. That's a really odd perspective IMO

What is wrong with wanting "to accomplish all his research sitting on his couch with his computer on his lap"? Just because the current system makes that impossible seems a very poor rationale for criticism of the author's position; that sounds like nothing more than "we've always done it that way".

It is my opinion that the financial motives that underpin the existing publishing industry (in both music and all forms of literature - including scientific) are outdated models that have little relationship with the human desires that create the works exploited by the publishing industry. If we were going to design a system to produce and deliver for social consumption works of 'intellectual property' from scratch I seriously doubt it would look anything at all like what we have and would instead favor the model proposed by Google.

[enlightenment]

6. There's nothing wrong

with wanting to sit on his couch and do all his research on his computer, of course. He just sounds like a petulant child, annoyed because he has to actually get up and go find something rather than having it delivered like a pizza.

The author isn't thinking any further than his own field, but is advocating applying his model to all fields (you're doing the same thing - it's not all about the publishing industry or living persons' desire to share their intellectual property. People have been writing stuff down for a very long time). I am an advocate for the preservation of archival material through digitization, but I don't believe it will work for everything. Some research material just wouldn't survive digitization . . . I suppose those materials should just be tossed because Google can't put it online?

As far as Google books being the wave of the future . . .

Right now, I can go to an archive or library or special collection and do research, for free. If I want a photocopy of something, I pay for it. If I want to spend the time copying it down, I pay nothing but my time. Google books has some - not all - information in the public domain that I could download in PDF, for free. Most of the information is restricted, however, so it really serves as little more than a glorified search engine. And I'm not convinced that Google's motives are purely altruistic, either.

I did a search in Google Books for his "wave motors" (also 'wave motor') - if he's using Google books as a search engine, yes - it brings up more hits than WorldCat or the LOC, although many are duplicates and many others are nothing more than indices, rather than actual articles. If he's looking to read older material online, he's in good shape . . . if he's looking for material written before 1930, because nothing later than that is available in the public domain or full view. He'll still have to get up and locate the physical copies of anything later than that.

I like the Google search model, but it only works for material that they have digitized . . . which goes right back around to the point that not everything CAN or WILL be digitized.

[kristopher]

8. Where the hell do you get the idea it gets digitized or trashed?

Your criticisms are based on the functioning of an incomplete system and the absurd assumption that everything worth knowing would have to be digitized or trashed.
Get a clue.

[anonymous171]

3. Leave it to sheltered technophiles to make stupid arguments like this

He needs to look into the legal repercussions of allowing one corporation (yes, Google is a corporation, like Microsoft) to have all of this power.

[Trillo]

5. I'm one of the folks who also love Google Books.

It's full text search capability is so much more improved over the library's card catalog that were common in my school years.

Those days libraries had paper cards in a card catalog that itself was a series of drawers with the cards in them. The card had the book title and a Dewey decimal number that indicated where in the library the book could be found. If I recalll correctly, sometimes a card catalog was also indexed by "subject". So then we could go find the book on the library shelf and thumb through it to see if it might have the information we were looking for, and generally speaking, books on similar subjects tended to be placed in the same general library-shelf area.

Google Books search represents a vast time savings when looking for information.

[HamdenRice]

7. Every musician I know is leaving the business because of I-tunes/Ipod. Books are next.

Google books is a terrible thing that threatens basically to end not just the publishing of books, but the writing of books. Music is already gone. What top 40 song have you heard recently that has "swept the nation"? Newspapers are right behind them.

Unless they figure out a way to pay authors, google books will do the same to books. Why write if you can't get paid?

We're about to become an even more spectacularly stupid society, living off the accumulated wisdom of already written books, but with no one actually writing new stuff.

[kristopher]

9. I couldn't disagree more...

People have been making music since they were people and they aren't going to stop just because they aren't made mega-rich by doing it. The publishing houses worked when there was no way to comb the local level for talent but now that anyone can publish their own music there is no need for them any longer -all they represent are a bottleneck where money accumulates and vast amounts of musical talent is consigned to the trash heap.