An Endless Shelf for Library Books

GRAY-HAIRED and slightly stooped, professor Sidney Verba doesn't look like a T-shirted guru of the computer age. But his position as head of Harvard's libraries has put him in just that spot. Along with his counterparts at Stanford, Oxford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library, Verba is part of the Google Library Project. The project, when completed, will place millions of volumes of books, among them many very old and irreplaceable volumes, on the Internet to be searched by Google's powerful search engines. When complete, the process will open up millions of lost texts to new generations.

The value of the project to the "mega libraries" like Harvard's is enormous. Before Google came along, Verba had looked into digitizing the Harvard library. It was an obvious way to protect the 15 million volumes against normal wear and tear and against the possibility of fire or other destruction.

But Verba came up against two big problems: The cost was enormous, and the technology was such that it threatened to damage the precious old works it was seeking to preserve. When Google first approached Verba with the library project Verba thought that they were "smoking something." Nearly a year later, however, they came back with new technology that does not damage the old books and with an offer even a wealthy institution can't pass up — they offered to give Harvard a digital copy of all their books — for free.

But in between the offer and the execution came a bump in the road. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google for copyright infringement. The grand plans are pretty much on hold, and Verba admits that he knows more about the "fair use" provision of the copyright law than he ever imagined he would.

Google argues that they are not violating copyright laws because the only books people will be able to download in their entirety are books whose copyright has already expired. But the conflict comes over those books whose copyright is still in effect. Google argues that only descriptions of the book and excerpts will be placed on the Web and available to the public — exactly what a library or a bookstore does now to give readers a flavor of the book. They argue that this will help publishers sell books — not hurt their sales — and that it is well within the "fair use" provisions of the copyright law.

The problem, however, comes with the fact that in order to excerpt small portions for the Web and in order to gain the true advantage of Google's powerful search engines, Google will have to scan the entire book into the system and keep it there. The publishers are not content with Google's assurances that their project will increase sales. They argue that they need to grant Google permission or some kind of licensing.

What's shaping up is a classic new economy/old economy struggle. In the minds of those in the high-tech world, openness and profit are not in conflict. The grandfather of the Google Library Project is former vice president Al Gore, who, as a congressman and senator brought the Internet into the modern age by using one powerful image — the ability of a little girl in Carthage, Tenn., to access a book from the Library of Congress.

He helped Google start the library project, and he urges people to read an article from the October 2004 issue of Wired magazine called "The Long Tail." In it Chris Anderson argues: "Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space. . ." The future, he argues, is Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service that offers and makes money on more than 735,000 tracks. The parallel to the world of bookstores and libraries is obvious.

But the publishing industry views this new world with suspicion. At stake is the meaning of copyright in a digital age and the effects on the economics of publishing, neither of which are very well understood. In the meantime, professor Verba's grand vision is on hold while the courts and everyone else struggle to get a grip, one more time, on the information age.

Elaine Kamarck is a lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a former senior adviser to the Clinton-Gore administration.