Winners and Losers by Kieran Levis

Author:Kieran Levis
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2014-02-14T04:30:00+00:00

Organizing the world's knowledge

Google's founders, at one point at least, ranked the goal of organizing the world's knowledge more highly than business success. The Web, however, contains only a small fraction of the world's knowledge. The serious stuff is to be found in books, and very few of these are easily accessible. Virtually no sizeable library has the financial resources to put its collection online.

In 2002, Google started work on digitizing the University of Michigan's collection of 7 million books, at its own cost, provided that it could offer users limited access to the contents. It subsequently struck similar deals with the universities of Oxford, Stanford and Harvard and with the New York Public Library. In 2004, Google announced its Book Search service, which aspires eventually to include all 32 million books currently catalogued.

Several publishers welcomed the initiative as most readers have no means of knowing about the 175,000 books published each year. Laurence Kirschbaum of Time Warner believes that 'Google is now the gatekeeper. They are reaching an audience that we as publishers and authors are not reaching. It makes perfect sense to use the specificity of a search engine as a tool for selling books.'

However, in 2005 several publishers, including some who had signed up for Book Search, sued. They were happy for Google to help them sell new books but objected to its copying of others without consent. This dispute is still going on. Freedom of information advocates are concerned that if Google bought off these publishers, it could create barriers to competitors. Since these include Microsoft, which has enjoyed accusing its irritating rival of throwing its weight around, this does not seem too alarming. But Google has given an impression of arrogance, which could be its undoing.

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