Jeff John Roberts: The Battle for the Books: Inside Google’s Gambit to Create the World’s Biggest Library

Abstract

Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults read an ebook in 2012, and ebooks now make up over 20 % of big U.S. trade publishers’ revenues. With tablets, smartphones and e-readers becoming ever cheaper, it is clear that the digital reading revolution is here to stay. This revolution has potential to give everyday readers access to books they might never have had the chance to discover or read before, straight from any internet-connected device. But, as Jeff John Roberts makes clear in his new short ebook ‘‘The Battle for the Books: Inside Google’s Gambit to Create the World’s Biggest Library,’’ conflicts between authors, publishers and technology companies make the goal of creating a universal digital library difficult to achieve. In ‘‘The Battle for the Books,’’ Roberts—my colleague at GigaOM’s paidContent tech news website—explores Google’s seven-year quest to create a modern-day Library of Alexandria. Unlike the ancient Egyptian version, however, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s digital library could never be destroyed. Starting in 2004, Google began to explore how to carry out the gargantuan task of digitizing all the books in the world and creating a searchable Internet database where anybody could access them. In a 2004 editorial, the New York Times wrote, ‘‘the idea of making books available online is not new, but this plan represents an enormous shift in scale, so enormous that if it is carried out successfully, it may redefine the nature of the Internet and the university.’’ Working with big libraries— Stanford, Oxford, the University of Michigan, Harvard and the New York Public Library—Google began scanning truckloads of books in 2005. Yet the initiative did not look so good to everyone. Book publishers believed that Google Books, which officially launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2004, infringed on copyright. Google aimed to scan all books, including those that were out-of-print but still under copyright. In 2005, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild sued Google for copyright infringement. Roberts