Google co-founder Sergey Brin spoke up about the Google books settlement on today’s New York Times op-ed page. It was interesting to see one of the brains behind Google explain the company’s lofty goals of creating, as the op-ed’s title puts it, “A Library to Last Forever”:
In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will “impress the necessity of something being done” to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.
I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this opportunity.
Also, the best line:
The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns.
I’m not even going to try to comment on the finer details of the settlement in this post, or accuse Google of limiting my unicorn access. But I will refer anyone interested in some great narrative on Brin, his Google co-founder Larry Page, and their dream of becoming the world’s librarians to Richard Brandt’s Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain, now available from Portfolio. Here’s just a taste, describing the earliest days of Google’s book project:
The first problem they had to face was how to get the books into digital form. They wondered how long it would take to scan and digitize every book in the world. So Larry decided to find out by scanning one book. He and Marissa Mayer, then a product manager, took a camera, a three-hundred-page book, and a metronome into his office. Using the metronome to keep time, Marissa turned the pages while Larry photographed each one. It took them forty minutes to capture all three hundred pages…
Want more? Go read the book.
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