I thought I had written my own robust defence of Google Book Search and book digitisation in general but it seems I haven’t - at least I haven’t found any on this blog or my personal one (though I posted enthusastically about meeting Brewster Kahle who runs the Internet Archive and briefly mentioned my own experience of using Google Books).
Kevin Kelly has had a go at providing a popular account of the potential importance and utility of the widespread availability of books online in Scan This Book! in the New York Times. He rehearses many of the good arguments against the ever-lengthening text copyright regime and for the social utility of book scanning programmes but unfortunately his argument is somewhat spoiled by his need to “epater les bourgeois”.
First by hyperbolic statements: “The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.” Inventions? Talmudic scholars (for one) would be surprised to learn we had just invented annotation.
Secondly, and more importantly, by un-necessarily sweeping and apocalyptic predictions about the way technology will (must?) change existing businesses (like publishing).
Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library.
Much of what he says is arguably valid for non-fiction and particularly scientific research but less so for fiction where (as Updike says) we actually seem to like reading (or viewing) self-contained narratives (though we may then go on to comment on them or construct other self-contained narratives based on them).
He usefully points out that academic science is heading faster than other fields towards the universal library but doesn’t think through the implications. Academics need to publish freely to advance and do so happily but only because there is a state system in place that pays them to be experts because society benefits from their creation and dissemination of knowledge. It is hard to imagine the same model being applied to the writers of cookbooks, say, but in the UK we pay authors a (very) modest sum when their books are checked out of the public library.
Could some form of super-UNESCO (or a number of national government initiatives) help to fund freely-available fiction (or other creative works) to be added to the universal Internet library of the future? Perhaps paid for through a levy on broadband subscriptions as suggested by some in France - the Global License? This is approximately the way the BBC works, for example (though it is not as free as it should be in sharing the content that our license fees have paid for). Surely this is a more attractive proposition for artists than having to individually flog “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, ads, sponsorship or periodic subscriptions” which KK suggests are the options that will be available to artists in the brave new world when their individual works themselves are no longer saleable.
KK anticipates some of the hostile reaction that followed from John Updike (speaking predominantly on behalf of fiction authors) and by Nicholas Carr (among others) more generally:
Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)
I for one am in the young enthusiast camp but I don’t think it means that the way things work in the creative industries has to be swept away in order to bring the (near)-universal Internet library about.
If we could reduce the term of copyright to 14 years, renewable for another 14 (as Creative Commons suggests) and if copyright could be easily asserted at a central database but the default for works where the ownership was unclear was that such work would be in the public domain, authors would still be able to get paid for their works during their most valuable commercial life but we would have a huge public domain of useful information instead of the stunted one we have now.
The above suggestions still radical (more radical than many authors and publishers would like, I am sure) but are consistent with the new potentials technology offers without requiring the total restructuring of publishing…
I’ve not provided as fully thought-through or well-ordered set of arguments here as I’d like (and not perhaps a particularly original point of view either - it draws heavily on Lawrence Lessig’s thinking, for example) but there’s as much polishing here as I can spare considering the £0 I am getting paid to write this! What do you think?
Update: As if in answer to my wishes, I have just heard about a very promising bill in the US House of Representatives - the Orphan Works Act which would release into the public domain works where the owner is no longer known. Someone should set up a campaign to support Lamar Smith (the bill’s sponsor).
David Brake
