(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/opinion/09brin.html?hp)
By SERGEY BRIN
(co-founder and technology president of Google)
Mountain View, Calif.
"THE fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the
popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to
properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the
electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to own and
operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting
stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and utility produced
popular impressions which still exist."
This quotation would hardly surprise anyone who follows electric vehicles.
But it may be surprising to hear that in the year when it was written
thousands of electric cars were produced and that year was nearly a
century ago. This appeared in a 1916 issue of the journal Electrical
World, which I found in Google Books, our searchable repository of
millions of books. It may seem strange to look back a hundred years on a
topic that is so contemporary, yet I often find that the past has valuable
lessons for the future. In this case, I was lucky — electric vehicles were
studied and written about extensively early in the 20th century, and there
are many books on the subject from which to choose. Because books
published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able to view them
easily.
But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone
except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books
written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare
exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are
in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of
libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and
forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become
impossible to track down.
Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate
slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at
Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books.
Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at
Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The
Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this
book itself is no longer available.
Because books are such an important part of the world's collective
knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google,
first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a
fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and
challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it.
But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was
born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they
number over 10 million and counting.
The next year we were sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of
American Publishers over the project. While we have had disagreements, we
have a common goal — to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of
out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a
result, we were able to work together to devise a settlement that
accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for
authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will
now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.
There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have
offered their opinions, both for and against. I would like to take this
opportunity to dispel some myths about the agreement and to share why I am
proud of this undertaking. This agreement aims to make millions of
out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free
with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the
rights holders, be they authors or publishers.
Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license
because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of
the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights
holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or
withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights
holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access
policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose
owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights
holders, giving them an incentive to step forward.
Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or
asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print
books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company
or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement
limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits
consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical
out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of
leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at
such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have
spared Google a tremendous amount of effort. But despite a number of
important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund
others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a
comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the
requisite resources. At least one such service will have to exist if there
are ever to be one hundred.
If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an
easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will
encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way
for other projects to obtain permissions. While new projects will not
immediately have the same rights to orphan works, the agreement will be a
beacon of compromise in case of a similar lawsuit, and it will serve as a
precedent for orphan works legislation, which Google has always supported
and will continue to support.
Last, there have been objections to specific aspects of the Google Books
product and the future service as planned under the settlement, including
questions about the quality of bibliographic information, our choice of
classification system and the details of our privacy policy. These are all
valid questions, and being a company that obsesses over the quality of our
products, we are working hard to address them — improving bibliographic
information and categorization, and further detailing our privacy policy.
And if we don't get our product right, then others will. But one thing
that is sure to halt any such progress is to have no settlement at all.
In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books,
Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and
millions of books, in the hope that such a record will "impress the
necessity of something being done" to preserve them. The famous library at
Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did
the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the
collection.
I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest
otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in
the world's foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can
access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a
role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century.
Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward
this goal, but it's an important step. Let's not miss this opportunity.
Sergey Brin is the co-founder and technology president of Google.
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