Google has been even more zeitgeisty than normal lately. Last week, Dilbert featured Google and its Death Ray (used to shoot a satelite out of the sky and into Dilbert's house, to keep him from developing his new search engine). Then Leslie Walker, in her technology column for the Washington Post, wrote about Google's controversial project to scan whole libraries (University of Michigan, Harvard), to the litigious chagrin of the big publishers that are suing them for copyright infringement.
And then there was the rampant, Google-inspired technophobia at BookExpo America 2006, held at the DC Convention Center this past weekend (how did I miss that?), reported by the Washington Post (p. C01). In a keynote, the venerable John Updike "threw the book" at Kevin Kelly, author of "Scan This Book!" a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, in which Kelly had the effrontery to praise Google's library scanning efforts.
First of all, I can understand Updike's fear. Updike writes "literary" fiction, a genre almost extinct in today's marketplace. He makes his living from the sale of books. Of course he's concerned when some over-Wired technogeek like Kevin Kelly crows about how in the future all books will be part of the digital commons, accessible for free on the Web. That would put him out of business.
But then the big publishers don't give a shit about "literary" fiction any more than bibliophobic technogeeks (and I'm not saying Kelly is bibliophobic: he just wants universal access to books). They publish Updike because he's a "brand name." Updike would have a hell of a harder time if he was starting out now. Most of the big publishers are part of huge conglomerates that demand impossible profit margins, which means crappy books like The Da Vinci Code get published, with huge advances, and baby Updikes get shut out.
So profit-driven conglomerates and schlocky writers are just as much the enemy as Google.
I consider myself a bibliophile AND a technogeek. I don't see how they need to be mutually exclusive. In fact, I've argued (and I'll argue here) that digitization has helped renew book materiality, by letting us see old, interesting books (case in point: William Blake) online that would otherwise be locked up in a library far, far away.
Digitization has made me appreciate books more, and not just because they make me nostalgic for a time in which books were the supreme form of media. Digitization highlights the technology of media, helping us see what a brilliant technology the book is.
I often think that many of those who criticize Google's efforts to scan library books have not actually used Google's Book Search. Yes, whole copies of in-copyright books are scanned and included in the service, but that's only to enable searching the text. Only a few pages of books are accessible at any one time. Book Search also includes such things as tables of contents and indexes, allowing the person browsing to get a good sense of the book. All this information can only help to sell books.
All that said, I still remain a little skeptical of Google's ambition to create a huge, universal library. I always get a little uneasy when a huge corporation claims it is doing something altruistic. But as long as they keep their ads off the scans of those old books, I'm down with it for now.
Posted by jeb at May 23, 2006 5:33 PM | TrackBack