Nicholas Carr: The Library of Utopia
In his 1938 book World Brain, H.G. Wells imagined a time when every person on the planet would have access to "all that is thought or known.. Google's ambitious book-scanning program is in the courts. Now a Harvard-led group is launching its own effort to put our literary heritage online. Will the Ivy League succeed where Silicon Valley failed?
The 1930s were a decade of rapid advances in microphotography, and Wells assumed that microfilm would be the technology to make the corpus of human knowledge universally available. "The time is close at hand," he wrote, "when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica." Wells's optimism was misplaced. The Second World War put idealistic ventures on hold, and after peace was restored, technical constraints made his plan unworkable. Though microfilm would remain an important medium for storing and preserving documents, it proved too unwieldy, too fragile, and too expensive to serve as the basis for a broad system of knowledge transmission. But Wells's idea is still alive. Today, 75 years later, the prospect of creating a public repository of every book ever published—what the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer calls "the library of utopia"—seems well within our grasp. With the Internet, we have an information system that can store and transmit documents efficiently and cheaply, delivering them on demand to anyone with a computer or a smart phone. All that remains to be done is to digitize the more than 100 million books that have appeared since Gutenberg invented movable type, index their contents, add some descriptive metadata, and put them online with tools for viewing and searching.
It sounds straightforward. And if it were just a matter of moving bits and bytes around, a universal online library might already exist. Google, after all, has been working on the challenge for 10 years. But the search giant's book program has foundered; it is mired in a legal swamp. Now another momentous project to build a universal library is taking shape. It springs not from Silicon Valley but from Harvard University. The Digital Public Library of America—the DPLA—has big goals, big names, and big contributors. And yet for all the project's strengths, its success is far from assured. Like Google before it, the DPLA is learning that the major problem with constructing a universal library nowadays has little to do with technology. It's the thorny tangle of legal, commercial, and political issues that surrounds the publishing business. Internet or not, the world may still not be ready for the library of utopia.
GOOGLE'S TRAVAILS: Larry Page isn't known for his literary sensibility, but he does like to think big. In 2002, the Google cofounder decided that it was time for his young company to scan all the world's books into its database. If printed texts weren't brought online, he feared, Google would never fulfill its mission of making the world's information "universally accessible and useful." After doing some book-scanning tests in his office—he manned the camera while Marissa Mayer, then a product manager, turned pages to the beat of a metronome—he concluded that Google had the smarts and the money to get the job done. He set a team of engineers and programmers to work. In a matter of months, they had invented an ingenious scanning device that used a stereoscopic infrared camera to correct for the bowing of pages that occurs when a book is opened. The new scanner made it possible to digitize books rapidly without cutting off their spines or otherwise damaging them. The team also wrote character recognition software that could decipher unusual fonts and other textual oddities in more than 400 languages.
In 2004, Page and his colleagues went public with their project, which they would later name Google Book Search—a reminder that the company, at least originally, thought of the service essentially as an extension of its search engine. Five of the world's largest research libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Oxford and Harvard, signed on as partners. They agreed to let Google digitize books from their collections in return for copies of the images. The company went on a scanning binge, making digital replicas of millions of volumes. It didn't always restrict itself to books in the public domain; it scanned ones still under copyright, too. That's when the trouble started. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google, claiming that copying entire books, even with the intent of showing only a few lines of text in search results, constituted "massive" copyright infringement.
Google then made a fateful choice. Instead of going to trial and defending Book Search on grounds that it amounted to "fair use" of copyright-protected material—a case that some legal scholars believe it might have won—it negotiated a sweeping settlement with its adversaries. In 2008, the company agreed to pay large sums to authors and publishers in return for permission to develop a commercial database of books. Under the terms of the deal, Google would be able to sell subscriptions to the database to libraries and other institutions while also using the service as a means for selling e-books and displaying advertisements.
That only deepened the controversy. Librarians and academics lined up to oppose the deal. Many authors asked that their works be exempted from it. The U.S. Justice Department raised antitrust concerns. Foreign publishers howled. Last year, after a final round of legal maneuvering, federal district judge Denny Chin rejected the settlement, saying it "would simply go too far." Listing a variety of objections, he argued that the pact would not only "grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners," but also reward the company for its "wholesale copying of copyrighted works" in the past. The company now finds itself nearly back at square one..
SEEKING ENLIGHTENMENT: If you were looking for Larry Page's opposite, you would be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Robert Darnton. A distinguished historian and prize-winning author, a former Rhodes scholar and MacArthur fellow, a Chevalier in France's Légion d'Honneur, and a 2011 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the 72-year-old Darnton is everything that Page is not: eloquent, diplomatic, and embedded in the literary establishment. If Page is a bull in a china shop, Darnton is the china shop's proprietor.
But Darnton has one thing in common with Page: an ardent desire to see a universal library established online, a library that would, as he puts it, "make all knowledge available to all citizens." In the 1990s he initiated two groundbreaking projects to digitize scholarly and historical works, and by the end of the decade he was writing erudite essays about the possibilities of electronic books and digital scholarship. In 2007 he was recruited to Harvard and named the director of its library system, giving him a prominent perch for promoting his dream. Although Harvard was one of the original partners in Google's scanning scheme, Darnton soon became the most eminent and influential critic of the Book Search settlement, writing articles and giving lectures in opposition to the deal. His criticism was as withering as it was learned. Google Book Search, he maintained, was "a commercial speculation" that, under the liberal terms of the settlement, seemed fated to grow into "a hegemonic, financially unbeatable, technologically unassailable, and legally invulnerable enterprise that can crush all competition." It would become "a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel, but of access to information.".. read more http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/427628/the-library-of-utopia/
The 1930s were a decade of rapid advances in microphotography, and Wells assumed that microfilm would be the technology to make the corpus of human knowledge universally available. "The time is close at hand," he wrote, "when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica." Wells's optimism was misplaced. The Second World War put idealistic ventures on hold, and after peace was restored, technical constraints made his plan unworkable. Though microfilm would remain an important medium for storing and preserving documents, it proved too unwieldy, too fragile, and too expensive to serve as the basis for a broad system of knowledge transmission. But Wells's idea is still alive. Today, 75 years later, the prospect of creating a public repository of every book ever published—what the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer calls "the library of utopia"—seems well within our grasp. With the Internet, we have an information system that can store and transmit documents efficiently and cheaply, delivering them on demand to anyone with a computer or a smart phone. All that remains to be done is to digitize the more than 100 million books that have appeared since Gutenberg invented movable type, index their contents, add some descriptive metadata, and put them online with tools for viewing and searching.
It sounds straightforward. And if it were just a matter of moving bits and bytes around, a universal online library might already exist. Google, after all, has been working on the challenge for 10 years. But the search giant's book program has foundered; it is mired in a legal swamp. Now another momentous project to build a universal library is taking shape. It springs not from Silicon Valley but from Harvard University. The Digital Public Library of America—the DPLA—has big goals, big names, and big contributors. And yet for all the project's strengths, its success is far from assured. Like Google before it, the DPLA is learning that the major problem with constructing a universal library nowadays has little to do with technology. It's the thorny tangle of legal, commercial, and political issues that surrounds the publishing business. Internet or not, the world may still not be ready for the library of utopia.
GOOGLE'S TRAVAILS: Larry Page isn't known for his literary sensibility, but he does like to think big. In 2002, the Google cofounder decided that it was time for his young company to scan all the world's books into its database. If printed texts weren't brought online, he feared, Google would never fulfill its mission of making the world's information "universally accessible and useful." After doing some book-scanning tests in his office—he manned the camera while Marissa Mayer, then a product manager, turned pages to the beat of a metronome—he concluded that Google had the smarts and the money to get the job done. He set a team of engineers and programmers to work. In a matter of months, they had invented an ingenious scanning device that used a stereoscopic infrared camera to correct for the bowing of pages that occurs when a book is opened. The new scanner made it possible to digitize books rapidly without cutting off their spines or otherwise damaging them. The team also wrote character recognition software that could decipher unusual fonts and other textual oddities in more than 400 languages.
In 2004, Page and his colleagues went public with their project, which they would later name Google Book Search—a reminder that the company, at least originally, thought of the service essentially as an extension of its search engine. Five of the world's largest research libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Oxford and Harvard, signed on as partners. They agreed to let Google digitize books from their collections in return for copies of the images. The company went on a scanning binge, making digital replicas of millions of volumes. It didn't always restrict itself to books in the public domain; it scanned ones still under copyright, too. That's when the trouble started. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google, claiming that copying entire books, even with the intent of showing only a few lines of text in search results, constituted "massive" copyright infringement.
Google then made a fateful choice. Instead of going to trial and defending Book Search on grounds that it amounted to "fair use" of copyright-protected material—a case that some legal scholars believe it might have won—it negotiated a sweeping settlement with its adversaries. In 2008, the company agreed to pay large sums to authors and publishers in return for permission to develop a commercial database of books. Under the terms of the deal, Google would be able to sell subscriptions to the database to libraries and other institutions while also using the service as a means for selling e-books and displaying advertisements.
That only deepened the controversy. Librarians and academics lined up to oppose the deal. Many authors asked that their works be exempted from it. The U.S. Justice Department raised antitrust concerns. Foreign publishers howled. Last year, after a final round of legal maneuvering, federal district judge Denny Chin rejected the settlement, saying it "would simply go too far." Listing a variety of objections, he argued that the pact would not only "grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners," but also reward the company for its "wholesale copying of copyrighted works" in the past. The company now finds itself nearly back at square one..
SEEKING ENLIGHTENMENT: If you were looking for Larry Page's opposite, you would be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Robert Darnton. A distinguished historian and prize-winning author, a former Rhodes scholar and MacArthur fellow, a Chevalier in France's Légion d'Honneur, and a 2011 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the 72-year-old Darnton is everything that Page is not: eloquent, diplomatic, and embedded in the literary establishment. If Page is a bull in a china shop, Darnton is the china shop's proprietor.
But Darnton has one thing in common with Page: an ardent desire to see a universal library established online, a library that would, as he puts it, "make all knowledge available to all citizens." In the 1990s he initiated two groundbreaking projects to digitize scholarly and historical works, and by the end of the decade he was writing erudite essays about the possibilities of electronic books and digital scholarship. In 2007 he was recruited to Harvard and named the director of its library system, giving him a prominent perch for promoting his dream. Although Harvard was one of the original partners in Google's scanning scheme, Darnton soon became the most eminent and influential critic of the Book Search settlement, writing articles and giving lectures in opposition to the deal. His criticism was as withering as it was learned. Google Book Search, he maintained, was "a commercial speculation" that, under the liberal terms of the settlement, seemed fated to grow into "a hegemonic, financially unbeatable, technologically unassailable, and legally invulnerable enterprise that can crush all competition." It would become "a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel, but of access to information.".. read more http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/427628/the-library-of-utopia/
