Vinton Cerf might be best known as a founding father of the internet, but it was in his capacity as Google’s chief internet evangelist (and bibliophile) that he sat down with Washington Post reporter Leslie Walker to discuss Google Book Search. The point of the project is to fully digitize as many books as possible to make them searchable, which he puts into perspective from a book lover’s point of view:
“Think for a moment about the dead-tree problem…When you stand in your own personal library looking for something and you realize that A, you can’t remember which book it was in, and B, there’s no way you can go through manually looking at all the pages, then you think, ‘God, I wish all this stuff was online.’”
The publishing industry, surprisingly enough, does not exactly agree with that sentiment. Although Google does not make the full texts of copyrighted works available, it does return “snippets” of content – a few lines at most -
containing users’ search terms. Whether snippets are fair use or not is hotly disputed.
But Cerf insists that Google is out to help, not hurt, publishers. For instance, Google Book Search links to sellers like Amazon to entice users to buy the books containing the info they’re searching for. And Cerf sees a future in which a book’s inherent value would be increased by being published on the web and behaving like other web content, with reader annotations, audio and video enhancement, and links to related media.
“Because the Internet is a computing environment, a software environment, it’s possible to create a much richer kind of information than what we are typically accustomed to in books,” he says. Check out the rest of the piece here.
I think publishers are missing out on additional marketing if they don’t participate in this program. With 150,000 books published every year, cutting through the clutter is difficult for all but a short list of authors. I am more than happy to have my book A Million Little Pieces of Feces (a comic novel not really a parody of Frey’s book) in this program. Currently it is pending with Google books but is available at Amazon.com which also does something similar with its Search Inside the Book program. Now, Google will eventually have the hyperlink back to Amazon. What could possibly be wrong with that? People won’t read an entire novel online, so I am unconcerned with copyright issues.