News

« Headlines

Google's unlikely ally

12.03.07

Google has a plan to put books online - and an unlikely ally in the Bodleian Library, reports the Guardian. "The truth is that for all Google's virtuosity, most information isn't online. It's a difficult concept to measure, but some estimates put the proportion not on the internet at 85%, much of it in books. This is an obviously intoxicating temptation for a company seeking to organise the world's knowledge - as it has also proved for Amazon, and for Microsoft, which is involved in a similar project with the British Library, focusing on out-of-copyright books."

But the digitisation initiatives have provoked an angry clash with authors, the newspaper notes. Google's founders are steeped in the ethos first articulated by hippy futurist Stewart Brand, that "information wants to be free". Their genius, of course, was to make millions of dollars from it anyway. For many authors, by contrast, copyright is everything. "It's their only freehold," says historian Antony Beevor, a former chair of the Society of Authors. "As soon as they start giving it away, they'll never get it back."

Richard Ovenden, its keeper of special collections at the Bodleian, disagrees. "We haven't felt that our reputation has been blackened in any way" by working with Google, he says. "A generation of undergraduates, graduate students and young faculty have grown up with the internet. It's natural for them to assume that the information is online - and that it's on Google."

Guardian

Google Microsoft

See Also