Google Books Project Research Articles

Invisible Labour of Book Digitization Projects

A consequence of increased digitization and online access to library materials is that users may view the book digitization process as being devoid of human labour. This process is an example of an invisible infrastructure that utilizes the guise of access and efficiency to underpay, undervalue, and deskill workers. Ruhleder and Star’s (1996) infrastructure framework defines infrastructure as a system that is learned, works with other standards and base systems, and becomes visible upon breakdown. This paper examines the Google Books Project and libraries to illustrate how book digitization projects can easily be made invisible at both an inflated and local scale.

Digitization and the Market for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project

The free digital distribution of creative works could cannibalize demand for physical versions, but it could also boost physical sales by enabling consumers to discover the original work. We study the impact of the Google Books digitization project on the market for physical books. We find that digitization significantly boosts the demand for physical versions and provide evidence for the discovery channel. Moreover, digitization allows independent publishers to introduce new editions for existing books, further increasing sales. Our results highlight the potential of free digital distribution to strengthen the demand for and supply of physical products. (JEL D12, L82, L86)

Collective memory or the right to be forgotten? Cultures of digital memory and forgetting in the European Union

This article investigates cultures of digital memory and forgetting in the European Union. The article first gives some background to key debates in media memory studies, before going on to analyse the shaping of European Commission and European Union initiatives in relation to Google’s activities from the period 2004–present. The focus of inquiry for the discussion of memory is the Google Books project and Europeana, a database of digitized cultural collections drawn from European museums, libraries and archives. Attention is then given to questions of forgetting by exploring the tension between Google’s search and indexing mechanisms and the right to be forgotten. The article ends by reflecting on the scale of the shift in contemporary cultures of memory and forgetting, and considers how far European regulation enables possible interventions in this domain.

LABOUR AND DIGITIZATION

In 2011, artist Andrew Norman Wilson was working as a subcontractor doing video work for Google at the Mountainview California Googleplex. He’d noticed that the workers entering and exiting the building next door had different working conditions to the majority of the workers at the site and discovered they were working on the Google Books mass digitization project. One day he took his camera down to film them leaving the building at the end of the shift and the next day he was fired. Wilson used the footage to create a video he calls “Workers Leaving the Googleplex” (2011), and projects such as Krissy Wilson’s “The Art of Google Books” destabilise the fictional veneer of smooth clean surfaces that the Google Books project projects into the world. The growing field of critical infrastructure studies helps us to unpack and understand the multiple dimensions operating This paper argues that notions of the particularities of digital labour of all kinds are central to developing a more comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of digital cultural objects, both born-digital and digitised. The paper considers the often invisible, contingent, omitted or assumed labour involved in digitization projects, using thinking from critical infrastructure studies, new media, media archaeology and creative labour.

Harnessing big data for a multifunctional theory of the firm

This paper explores the potential of big data, such as those compiled by the Google Books project, to inform the dominant theories of the firm that tend to be grounded on strong assumptions about the capitalist nature of the modern society. Combining the novel methodologies of the digital age with Niklas Luhmann's theory of functional differentiation, we draw on big data-driven abductive reasoning to redirect the attention of management scholars away from the dominant contract-based and competence theories of capitalist firms toward organizations navigating the regime of functional differentiation, which is marked by contingent and historically evolving prominence of individual function systems. We conclude that this navigation requires appropriate strategic management tools which are no longer primarily geared to the economic function system but rather entail a radical reconfiguration of the firm as a multifunctional organization.

Digitization and the Demand for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project

Digitization has allowed customers to access content through online channels at low cost or for free. While free digital distribution has spurred concerns about cannibalizing demand for physical alternatives, digital distribution that incorporates search technologies could also allow the discovery of new content and boost, rather than displace, physical sales. To test this idea, we study the impact of the Google Books digitization project, which digitized large collections of written works and made the full texts of these works widely searchable. Exploiting a unique natural experiment from Harvard Libraries, which worked with Google Books to digitize its catalog over a period of five years, we find that digitization can boost sales of physical book editions by 5-8 percent. Digital distribution seems to stimulate demand through discovery: the increase in sales is stronger for less popular books and spills over to a digitized author’s non-digitized works. On the supply side, digitization allows small and independent publishers to discover new content and introduce new physical editions for existing books, further increasing sales. Combined, our results point to the potential of free digital distribution to stimulate discovery and strengthen the demand for and supply of physical products.

The Italian national digital newspaper library

The National Central Library of Rome, for the wealth of the periodic collections it conserved, since 1908 has been invested with the role of establishing and conserving the National Collection of periodical publications (Emeroteca). This task, arising from the specific attentions to the periodicals by director Domenico Gnoli and enhanced by his successor Giuliano Bonazzi, which also corresponded to the creation of a rich hall of newspapers and magazines, exposed to public consultation, went with the years fading. The participation of the Library, as coordinator, in the Google Books project that allowed the digitization of all Italian periodicals not subject to copyright restrictions, and the launch of a massive digitization campaign of the microfilms of the owned newspapers allow to rethink the original project and to create a digital national library for periodicals and newspapers to be constantly enriched with the participation of other institutions interested in the project.

The Swiss National Library

In Alexandria 12(3) 2000, as part of a series of pieces on The next ten years in national libraries' the then director of the Swiss National Library, Jean-Frederic Jauslin, outlined some plans and predictions for the next decade, including attempts to achieve legal deposit, gaining more autonomy for the library in order to increase its decision-making powers and working both on conservation of acidic paper and digitization for access. Nearly ten years later, we summarize the results and attempt the same exercise for the next ten years.The library's autonomy has increased as planned, and significant work has been carried out in conservation and preservation of both print and digital material. Plans for legal deposit were not fulfilled but fortunately the long-standing cooperation with the Associations of Swiss publishers has seen continued voluntary deposit of print material and discussions are under way with online publishers to achieve the same.The last ten years have seen a huge growth in online material but little or no decrease in print; in the next years, storage capacity for all media will be required. New underground stacks, inaugurated in August 2009, provide the library with space until 2030 at the current rate of print production. A major challenge will be the increased requirements for electronic storage capacity and preservation; not just for Web archiving and borndigital material but also for the large amounts of digitized material that are being produced.As new formats emerge in the next ten years, the library and others will face its first major tests in migration and/or emulation to secure access over time. The electronic book, long hailed as imminent, seems finally to have arrived. The proliferation of reading devices such as the Kindle may change both collection management and user expectations. Digitization on demand, currently a niche product for the library, will increase if e-readers make loading and access more user friendly. Ten years ago, Google was unknown; today the company is ubiquitous and its impact on digitization and the difficult question of copyright undeniable.The Google Book project has highlighted the difficult areas of orphan works, and varying durations of copyright across countries; these questions will continue to be particularly pertinent for comparatively young institutions such as the Swiss National Library, much of whose collection remains subject to copyright. Cooperation with rights holders will be essential: the Library has already started working in public/private partnerships to digitize and allow widespread access to material, especially newspapers. This form of cooperation will increase over the next years, also in partnership with other Swiss libraries to avoid duplication of effort and share costs in a financial climate that will continue to be challenging.National libraries around the world are seeking increasingly to underline their relevance to all sections of the public, not just a research 'elite'. The Swiss National Library has always been open to the general public and is unusual in that it lends out its more recent material for home use. …

Legal Issues: A Win for Google Bookss Maybe

Way back in 2004 Google announced a new project that would expand its web search capability by adding a wealth of new content through the scanning of books from some of the great academic libraries of the world. The social goal of the project was to bring to worldwide access a massive collection of historical, literary, and scholarly knowledge that had previously been limited a few researchers in a few libraries. Google’s economic goal, however, was to expand the value of it search engine business and, perhaps, create its own content database that could become a marketable asset. Originally the Google Print Library Project, it is now known as Google Books. Scanning books necessarily involves copying books. To no one’s surprise, the owners of copyrights of the books in the Google Books project objected and in 2005 lawsuits were filed by several publishers as well as a class action suit the Authors Guild, an association representing individual authors. The history of the suit has been well documented in Information Today and other sources, including the proposed settlements in 2009 and 2011. In 2011 a court rejected the proposed settlements, suggesting that they violated both copyright and antitrust laws, and the lawsuit continued. But the end may be in sight. On July 1, 2013 a federal appeals court handed Google a major–but not necessarily conclusive–victory in rejecting the Authors Guild’s claim of class action status.

Library Consortia and the CIC: Leveraging Scale for Collaborative Success

ABSTRACTConsortia distinguish themselves not only by their membership, but by the shared vision of those members to accomplish something greater than any could do alone. Now more than ever, the opportunity to develop significant collaborations exists in a networked environment. The emergence of supraregional efforts such as the HathiTrust Digital Library, the arXiv e-Print Archive, and the Google Book Project are successes in large-scale collaboration. Through descriptions of these services within the context of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), in addition to discussions of the evolution of traditional services such as resource sharing, this article explores the changing consortial environment and discusses the continued value of library consortia that are able to adapt to the changing priorities of their members.

Garner’s Modern English Usage by Bryan A. Garner

Reviewed by: Garner’s Modern English Usageby Bryan A. Garner Edward Finegan (bio) Garner’s Modern English Usage, 4th ed., by Bryan A. Garner. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. lvi + 1,056. $50.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-049148-2. “Prescriptivism is as American as apple pie or the NRA, and as inevitable as sex, death, and taxes,” John Algeo (2000, 246) has written. Unlike perennial popular interest in the subject, scholarly interest has waxed and waned, although a recent upswing can be noted in a series of Prescriptivism Conferences, initiated in Sheffield in 2003; the sixth has been announced for Vigo, Spain, in 2020. Values of competing kinds have been at the heart of prescriptivism and anti-prescriptivism for centuries, and the 2017 Prescriptivism Conference in Park City, Utah, identified “Value(s) and Language Prescriptivism” as its theme. Another thread among the 2017 participants was the putative distinction between descriptivism and prescriptivism: Is it a dichotomy or a continuum? In the discussion, I don’t recall anyone mentioning that Bryan Garner characterizes himself as “a kind of descriptive prescriber” (xxxvi) in the fourth installment of his series of usage dictionaries, titled Garner’s Modern English Usage( GMEU), “English Usage” now replacing the “American Usage” of earlier editions. 1 GMEUis unwieldy, weighing five pounds and registering over 1,100 pages. 2A couple of things differentiating it from the third edition (Garner 2009) highlight a more up-to-date approach. In the 2009 dust-jacket photo, Garner wears a dark suit with a shirt and tie, the shirt appearing to exhibit French cuffs, but in 2016 the shirt collar is unbuttoned, the tie is tossed, and Garner sports a light-colored jacket: iconically, an eye-catching reorientation to English usage. The hallmark of GMEU’s substantive jazziness is its reliance on Google ngrams to uncover frequency ratios of variant usages. First described by Michel et al. (2010), Google ngrams can trace the frequency of occurrence of any word (and some expressions) over the course of centuries as represented in millions of books digitized in the Google Books project. Multiple [End Page 120]expressions can be compared in the same ngram view (a useful feature relevant later in this review), and exploring ngrams is informative and often surprising. 3Reliance on corpora isn’t new for Garner, but reporting quantitative findings from the Google Books corpus is. The fourth edition’s fifty-six pages of front matter include the first edition’s lengthy preface, lists of essay entries and abbreviations, and a pronunciation guide (repeated on the inside back cover). New to the third edition and continued in the fourth are a key to Garner’s language-change index and two long essays: “Making Peace in the Language Wars” and “The Ongoing Tumult in English Usage.” 4While the two essays display less peace and more tumult than the title of the first essay suggests, GMEUoffers a limited course correction to Garner’s generally prescriptivist route and a possible opening to a modest accord among prescriptivists and descriptivists, something Garner has both encouraged and frustrated in earlier writing. Now GMEUdraws in part on the 25 million digitized volumes searchable via Google’s Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams), a body of texts about which interested parties can talk with reliability. GMEU’s back matter contains a glossary of grammatical, rhetorical, and other language-related terms in fifty-two tri-columned pages; a timeline of books on usage in eleven tri-columned pages; a select bibliography; and a select index of approximately 350 of the writers quoted or mentioned in the book. At the heart of GMEUare 983 pages of alphabetized entries in a section called “Garner’s Modern English Usage,” mirroring the title of the book. The name is apt in that the English usage described is, in the end, filtered through Garner’s eyes and ears and represents his view of what’s enshrined in Google Books and elsewhere. He conceded in the third edition that he “relied—unabashedly—on [his] own sense, based on a lifetime of serious linguistic study, of where a given usage falls on the spectrum...

Implications of the Google Books Project Settlement for the Global Library Community

Column Editor's NotesThe “Digital Trends and the Global Library Community” column examines technological advances internal and external to libraries. The focus is on how technology is changing the way services are provided to users, the methodologies used in the provision of those services, and the resulting scope of responsibilities of libraries and parent institutions. Interested authors are invited to submit proposals and articles to the column editor at marta.deyrup@shu.edu. Please include “IILR Submission” in the subject line of the e-mail.

The Making of an 'Orphan': Cultural Heritage Digitisation in the EU

As the definition of accessibility of cultural heritage changes under the impact of new technologies, public and private actors seek new ways to enhance digital access. The digitisation of 20th Century cultural heritage, however, is severely restricted by the potential subsistence of copyright and related rights. Different solutions have been considered to deal with this problem and, in particular: the adoption of a specific exception to copyright for libraries and other institutions with similar purposes (as in the United Kingdom and Germany); the use of the mechanism of extended collective licensing (as in Nordic countries); the creation of collecting societies responsible for the licensing of orphan works; the introduction of a public body in charge of licensing in a system of compulsory licenses (as in Canada); the limitation on remedy rule (as in the United States); or, finally, the adoption of national laws that provide for the automatic recognition and accessibility of orphan works as indicated in the other Member States. The EU’s own response has decidedly bet on the introduction of a copyright exception, through the Orphan Works Directive (2012/28/EU, hereinafter the “Directive”), which is thought of as an instrument to allow libraries, museums and other cultural institutions to digitise their collections of 19th and 20th century works. The Directive could potentially allow to lawfully digitise and make available a large number of works also with uncertain copyright status. Pursuant to the Directive, a work can be considered an orphan if, after a diligent search, its legitimate right-holders cannot be identified or located. Then, the EU pursued the scope to facilitate the digitisation and, consequently, the dissemination of works qualified as orphans, after a consultation of a large number of sources. Despite the emphasis which has surrounded its adoption, preliminary evidence shows that cultural institutions do not consider the scheme introduced by the Directive as scalable; in other words, they do not plan to use it as basis for mass digitisation projects. On the one side, the diligent search requirement is considered too onerous; on the other side, little attention is devoted to the underlying business models that would encourage digitisation. The involvement of private actors appears indeed limited to non-for-profit interventions, which explicitly rules out the main and principal digitiser on the global scale – the Google Books project. In this paper, we analyse the impact of the permitted uses on the digitization process of cultural heritage that can be carried out by those cultural institution benefitting from the exception. We will focus on the activity of making available (section 2) and reproduction for the purposes of digitization, making available, indexing, cataloguing, preservation and restoration (section 3). The division at hand is useful because the orphan work issue asks for different treatment depending on the type of use that would be made of the concerned works. On this background, we move to analyse the interaction between private and public sector in the field. In particular, we firstly analyse the ways into which the current framework envisages the funding of digitization processes and its limits (section 4). Within this context we assess the impact of public-private partnerships (section 5) to conclude by highlighting the weaknesses of the current EU framework for orphan works and its difficulties in achieving the goal of contributing to the creation of a European digital cultural heritage (section 6).

The Google Books Project is Lawful

The Google Books Project is Lawful

Google Book Search Project: the Pros and Cons

The article analyzes the Google Book Search project: its objectives, both the declared ones (the radical democratization of knowledge) and real (to create a new market of paid services), stages of the project’s implementation, dynamics of change in its assessments according to the American scientific journalism. It is noted that the project underwent a substantial correction in the course of litigation and developing of settlement agreement with holders of the copyright on the books included in the scope of operation of the Google Book Search. It indicates that the service was gradually modified towards greater comfort and comprehensiveness of the utilities provided. Particular attention is given to the identification of social and cultural implications of the monopolization of knowledge dissemination: the marginalization of large strata of the book heritage as a result of the absolutization of algorithms of the search results automatic ranking; the metadata errors that can mislead users; the preferences that the book search engine gives to the English literature. The article thoroughly analyzes the critical arguments against the cultural expansion of global brand, which were put forward by the professional library community. There is reviewed the position of Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of the French National Library, who considers the Google book project as continuation of the globalist cultural policy, leading to indirect discrimination of other cultures, which contradicts the Declaration on Cultural Diversity, UNESCO, 2001.

Digital Fatigue

Digital Fatigue Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Editor and Publisher (bio) The days of mourning the death of the printed book may finally be drawing to a close. After ten years of electronic euphoria in the book world, we may be seeing some signs of digital fatigue. This does not mean though that the musty used bookstores and soulless chain retailers that have slowly but steadily disappeared from our towns and cities will soon reopen. It would take nothing less than a complete collapse of the Internet to derail the dominance of book shopping online. The prices are too good and the selection too vast for the bricks and mortar bookstore to be effectively anything more than a showroom for books purchased online. Still, the number of independent bookstores in the United States has risen over the past eight years, not decreased. In 2009, there were 1,401 independent bookstore companies in the United States with 1,651 different locations. Over the next seven years, both the number of companies and the number of locations have increased every year—increased to the point where in 2016, there are 1,775 independent bookstore companies in the United States with 2,311 different locations: more than any in the preceding eight year period. So, while the chains like Barnes & Noble and Hastings may be struggling or worse, the independents are on the rise. Nor does this nascent digital fatigue mean a gross reduction in the total number of ebooks. Each year thousands of new titles are released by both traditional and non-traditional publishers. Also, older titles are becoming increasingly available through initiatives such as the Google Print Library Project. Launched in December of 2004, three months after Google Print itself was announced as a joint program with some of the major presses in the world, the Library Project was announced as one with some of the major libraries of the world. The following year Google Print was renamed Google Books, which over ten years later has become a major repository for ebooks. Still, the Google Books project is a poster child for the fatigue of the digital book revolution. Ten years ago, Google aimed within ten years to have publicly available through Google Books all of the world’s books. Its completion would mean that Google Books would have scanned all of the world’s books and that they would all be completely available online to the public—at no cost. To date, though Google Books contains an impressive 30 million volumes, most of the titles are inaccessible or only come through in snippets of text. To get a sense of the size of Google Books, consider that the Library of Congress contains around 37 million volumes. But the failure of the Google Books initiative has little to do with the size of its collection, which is already impressive, or people tiring of using digital books. Rather, the issue was one of how to deal with copyrights, use permission, and, ultimately, compensation to authors and publishers. In 2002, Google was scanning everything under the sun thinking that everyone would be happy with the idea that all books would in time be freely accessible to anyone with digital access. After years of haggling, a settlement was reached in 2008 with authors, publishers, and Google to make the collection available to the public for pay. However, in 2011, the 2008 settlement was thrown out by a federal judge. The task of sorting out the copyright issues was then handed to Congress, who to this day has not yet sorted them out. If you are curious as to how far Google was from its aim of digitizing all of the books in the world, Leonid Taycher, a software engineer who worked on the Google Books project gave a precise figure in 2010: 129,864,880. So, assuming that the programs written by the Google engineers were somewhat accurate in their estimations of the total number of extant books worldwide, Google Books is about 100 million titles away from their goal of 130 million. The failure of Google Books to achieve their goal of scanning and making all of the world’s books available online aside...

Lessons of the Google Book Search: What Is Next?

The article examines future prospects of the Google Book Project and its place in the development of the information society infrastructure. The article gives an overall assessment of the project Google Book Search in the context of digital revolution and changes in the institutional paradigm of modern libraries. Google Inc. formed a huge electronic library, establishing the right of access to it on the corporation’s own terms. Thus, the giant of IT-industry made a request for reformatting the paradigm of production and dissemination of knowledge. As a result, libraries, as social and cultural institutions, had to compete with the dynamic infrastructure of society web 2.0, based on commodification of the monopolistically provided services. The article notes that the expansion of the Google Book Search Project resulted in the intensification of national and international initiatives for creation of digital libraries on the basis of information resources digitization programs. At the end of the article, a conclusion is made that the most valuable lesson that the library community can learn from the history of the Google Library Project development is to realize their own social and cultural identity, inadmissibility of copying the methods of the information giants.

Google Books, Libraries, and Self-Respect: Information Justice beyond Distributions

If Google Books has been successful in furthering the cause of social justice with regard to information, it is along narrowly distributive lines. Drawing on critics of distributive justice and emphasizing the value of self-respect, the author argues that Google’s massive digital scanning initiative—especially as compared to the liberal democratic institution of the public library—exposes and exacerbates injustices with regard to information, technology, and institutions that are not easily captured along distributive lines. In particular, attention is paid to three features of the project—the quality of Google’s book scans, the politics of online search, and Google’s conception of the value of information—as demonstrative of the too-slender foundation for self-respect the Google Books project offers its users.

Transforming “Transformative Use”: The Growing Misinterpretation of the Fair Use Doctrine

Starting in late 2012, and continuing into late 2013, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York wreaked havoc on the traditional interpretation of the copyright infringement defense known as “fair use.” Two cases stemming from the advent of the Google Books Project are Author’s Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust and Author’s Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. These cases adopted a controversial interpretation of the fair use defense, codified in 17 U.S.C. § 107, when each case determined that the mass digitization of thousands of books constituted fair use merely because the digitization was what is known as “transformative use.”

Fair Use and the Antitrust Case in the Google Books Project

Fair Use and the Antitrust Case in the Google Books Project