The Google Book Search settlement, open access, and historical scholarship

I was just listening to the podcast assigned for next week’s class, Episode 29 of Digital Campus, which discusses the long tail as it applies to the Amazon Kindle and e-books in general. Digitization has a lot of potential for older or very esoteric books–books that have either gone out of print or have had limited printing runs or are otherwise commercially nonviable. Of course, for those books that are still under copyright, whoever was doing the digitizing would need to get permission to make the text available online.

This reminded me of what I’d recently read about sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin resigning from the Author’s Guild in light of the recent Google Book Search settlement. While I can’t claim to have much to contribute to this specific discussion, given my limited understanding of copyright law, I think that as we move historical scholarship into the digital realm we will need to reform our ideas about owning knowledge. In class last night, we discussed how although many historians may be wary of letting their research go for free on the internet, online publishing would open up historical scholarship and conversation to those who otherwise might not seek out their published work.

Although Google Books seems to open up access to the written word–and in the practical experience of the average user, it does–behind the scenes it sets a dangerous precedent. By giving Google free reign over any work whose author has not explicitly opted out, the settlement would establish Google as the world’s largest digital library, all under corporate control. I am uncomfortable entrusting the responsibility for open access to a commercial entity that does not have the interests of readers and scholars at heart.

More cogent arguments at the Open Book Alliance.