Google vs. the libraries

It seemed like a great idea at the time. In 2004, Google signed a deal with five major research libraries to digitize all the books in their collections. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and we're excited to be working with libraries to help make this mission a reality" proclaimed company cofounder Larry Page. It looked like an encouraging first step toward a world in which all knowledge was online, all the time.

Not everyone was so enthralled with this beatific vision of the Future According to Google. Authors had the temerity to insist they be paid for their digitized content, which was going to be used to sell Google ads, or, down the road, be loaded into a possible Google Reader. The Authors Guild sued, and eventually settled with Google, resulting in a complicated agreement about royalty payments that awaits the approval of a judge.

Libraries excluded from the Google project wondered where they would fit in. The words "Free to All" are etched in stone above the Boston Public Library, but last I checked, those words do not appear on the fuselages of the Boeings and Gulfstreams owned by Google founders Page and Sergey Brin. Google executives sound like they are doing the world an immense favor by digitizing books, rarely mentioning that they are in business to sell stuff, not give it away. "We felt it would be extremely useful to the world if books were in digital format," is how product manager Adam Smith explained to me the original impetus behind the digitization project. But this wasn't a charitable undertaking, was it? "It is useful to Google, and that's why we've done this," he said.

Is resistance futile? Not everyone thinks so. In 2005, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and the nonprofit Internet Archive launched an actual charity called the Open Content Alliance, which signed up 19 Massachusetts libraries, including the BPL, MIT, Brandeis, and Boston College, as well as huge systems like the University of California's. Open means open access to digitized books; by inference, Google means closed. Primary funder Microsoft withdrew its support this year, and the OCA is morphing into the Open Knowledge Commons, now supported by the Sloan Foundation, which will hold an organizational meeting at the Library of Congress next week.

Everyone's terrified of trashing Google, mainly because of the company's astonishing power in the marketplace, and because it has already digitized 7 million books that libraries want access to. "There's no Google-bashing," insists Maura Marx, executive director of the new Commons. "We need to ensure that there is a viable alternative and that access to knowledge remains open and does not become commodified." She and Google executive Smith note that some libraries, like California's, are cooperating both with Google and with open access initiatives.

Happily, not everyone is scared of Google. Harvard, one of the original participants in the 2004 deal, has decided not to allow Google to sell any of the university's copyrighted holdings. In a letter published by the Harvard Crimson, chief librarian Robert Darnton told his staff that Google's settlement with the Author's Guild "contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher-education community and by patrons of public libraries. . . . For now, the Harvard University Library will continue to explore other ways to open up its collections more broadly for the common good."

In a heated philippic, "Free Our Libraries!" posted on the website of the Boston Library Consortium, Richard Johnson, an adviser to the Association of Research Libraries, decries the "momentous, ill-considered shift . . . that threatens to limit the public rights in the collections assembled and maintained, often at public expense, in libraries around the globe."

"Companies are paying nothing for access to the crown jewels," Johnson writes. "We may awaken one day to find that our digital heritage has become private property rather than a public good."

Librarians of the world, unite! You have everything to lose: your books.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.