Google's Goal: Digitize Every Book Ever Printed
from PBS Newshour

In a new era of E-books, Internet giant Google is attempting to offer millions of books online. Spencer Michels looks at the controversial plan and what it could mean for the future of reading.

SPENCER MICHELS: Just before 9:00 most mornings, a truck belonging to Google pulls up at the Stanford University Library. It's loaded with books that Google checked out and is now returning, after having scanned them so they can be read by a computer.

No overdue fines here. As soon as the truck is empty, library workers load it up again with more books to digitize, part of an ambitious program that so far has scanned 12 million books at many libraries. The goal is to scan up to 40 million.

That's a tall order for Daniel Clancy, an engineer and the director of Google Books.

DANIEL CLANCY: Google said our mission is to organize all the world's information.

SPENCER MICHELS: He says the primary purpose of all the digitizing is to makes books searchable.

DANIEL CLANCY: The repository of our cultural and societal and history is really embodied in books. But, when you search the Web, you're not searching books. Many of these books were not -- are not digitally available.

SPENCER MICHELS: Clancy showed me how books are now appearing ever more frequently on Google searches.

DANIEL CLANCY: Every time you search Google, you're searching 12 million books. They were looking for this arcane -- it's called "Court of Admiralty." So, this is a very obscure, you know, long tail query that this person was looking for something, OK?

And now, when you click through, you see this book, that what you're seeing up here is actually a public domain book that we currently let this user see the entire book of. And then he can also download a copy of the book. And it's free.

SPENCER MICHELS: Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Michigan have signed agreements with Google authorizing the firm to scan their books.

Michael Keller, the Stanford librarian, says it's a valuable program.

MICHAEL KELLER: The indexing of every word in every one of the books would allow us to get more out of the books. Another goal was to make more accessible the contents of these libraries to others around the United States and indeed around the world.

SPENCER MICHELS: While Stanford digitizes some books on its own for special projects using a fairly slow and complicated Swiss-made scanner, Google uses its own proprietary system, which it wouldn't allow us to film.

The Google project has provoked loud criticism among some academics, authors and rival high-tech companies, some of whom have sued to halt or at least modify it.

Gary Reback is a Silicon Valley attorney who represents the Open Book Alliance, whose members include Microsoft and Amazon.com. He predicts that Google will start without charging for what it digitizes, but eventually will impose hefty fees.

GARY REBACK, attorney, Open Book Alliance: What Google is proposing here is not like any library you have ever been to. It's not a public library. It's a private library. And it's being run for profit, big profits. Google is going to charge university scholars, ordinary people, even schoolchildren, to get access to books that Google copied without the permission of the publisher or the author.
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