Monday, May 12, 2008
American Goliaths like Google and Amazon are quickly cornering the digital book market. Will online libraries doom the scholars and small presses of old Europe?
Aug 25, 2005 | The sounds of libraries in the past were not always terribly easy to pick out: the rustling of paper, the occasional scratching of pens, the odd scrape of a chair and whispered conversations. Nowadays, though, there are more sounds in the background. In a remote section of the venerable library at the University of Göttingen, founded in 1734, you hear hissing, clicking and whirring -- the sounds of Old Europe meeting new media.
An old volume lies open under glaring lights, as if it were spread out on an operating table. A librarian focuses the lens, checks the image on a computer monitor, and activates the scanner. Then she taps the left pedal with her foot, a glass plate rises with a hissing sound, she turns the page, and the plate lowers itself, whirring, onto the next page. Click. With this process, up to 300 pages an hour are being uploaded from the book world into the cyberworld as characters made of printer's ink are converted into 1's and 0's.
The work in the University of Göttingen library's digitization center is moving along at a steady clip. The project's nine full-time employees have already digitized more than 4 million pages from periodicals and thousands of volumes of books and transferred the data to the center's server, from which it can be downloaded in a matter of seconds through any computer connected to the system.
But while it may at first sound like a lot, library director Elmar Mittler is far from satisfied. "It's enough to drive you to despair," he says, speaking so quietly that one has to lean forward to understand him. But then he slaps his hand against the table and adds: "It's hard to believe how Germany has wasted its opportunities with digitization. Others are moving ahead, while we write reports."
Mittler, 65, is arguably one of the leading experts in this field. In the mid-1990s, he developed one of the first German catalogs available on a digital network. In 2000, his team unveiled the electronic version of one of the 15th-century Gutenberg Bibles on the Internet, all 1,282 pages reproduced in high quality and full color. Although USA Today celebrated the site as perhaps the best Web site to mark the 550th anniversary of the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the German public has hardly even noticed.
But that could soon change, especially in light of the newfound popularity of an old medium. After online games, blogs and podcasting, the big Internet companies have now discovered something of a totally different nature, at least for them: the good old book.
Especially startling was search engine Google's recent announcement of its intention to make the world's printed works available online. The company plans to digitize about 15 million works by 2015 and store them in a database, at a projected cost of up to $200 million. The tally of works digitized so far, according to Google, is already up to "several hundred thousand." The implications of the project are enormous. For example, someone who enters the term "Johannes Gutenberg" in the future will be referred not just to Web sites, but also to text passages in paper books, available in fully scanned, full text form, at least in the case of "generally free" books no longer under copyright protection. With new books, however, readers will have to make do with "text snippets" -- anything more would constitute copyright infringement.
At least a portion of the project's cost will be offset by targeted advertising that will provide links to libraries, publishers and bookstores for users interested in specific books.
Internet catalog merchant Amazon already offers a similar service. More than a hundred thousand English-language books can now be searched online for keywords, in what appears to be only the beginning of a more ambitious venture. As of July 2005, Amazon's database also includes German-language books from 120 publishers. The German trade publication "Buchreport" (Book Report) succinctly sums up the pull of the Internet, at least when it comes to books: "Those who find what they want read it." Amazon's book search engine has apparently increased sales of detective novels by 5 percent and comics by 48 percent.
The American Internet giant's entry into the business of book search engines signals the beginning of a deep-seated media revolution: While the printing of books makes dissemination of knowledge on an industrial scale possible, it is only the full-text search that automates access. In the past, for example, finding that specific passage from a book read long ago meant hours of flipping through hundreds of pages. Now, it will become as simple as plugging keywords into a search function.
Book search engines are still far from efficient, and the results are often laughably incomplete. But the potential is vast, with today's efforts representing only a first step toward a sort of universal library whose portals are open to anyone, day or night, whether in university towns like Göttingen or in an Internet cafe in Johannesburg.
But while the public appeal of this digital-library dream is strong, negative reactions in the professional world -- where librarians, publishing house executives and booksellers feel steamrolled by the marketing muscle of the world's Amazons and Googles -- are equally vehement. Critics are especially offended by Google's brusque approach. Instead of asking publishing houses for permission to scan their works, the company simply went ahead and did it. This approach is a "systematic violation of copyright law," fumed the Association of American University Presses.
Indeed, a wave of litigation is on the horizon, and authors are likely to be among the litigants. Anticipating trouble, Google recently announced that it was temporarily putting a stop to the scanning of books that could be problematic in terms of copyright law -- at least until November. According to an irritated Jens Redmer of Google, "the press has frequently portrayed this as an interruption, but the truth is that the disputed works make up an ever-shrinking slice of the pie."
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