WATCH OUT FOR GOOGLE

Peter Kilborn | 02/16/2010

Nowhere is the iconic status of books more obvious - and more abused - than in the hands of the proselytisers for the Google settlement. An article appeared in a recent edition of the Guardian newspaper (though no doubt syndicated elsewhere) by David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer at Google, which began ‘If you love books and care about the knowledge they contain, there is a problem that needs to be solved.’

The problem is that of ‘orphan works’, those numerous published titles which occupy the limbo between in-print and out-of copyright status. It comprises the substantial majority of titles published in the last hundred years that Google needs to digitise if it is to achieve its stated objective of ‘organising the world’s knowledge and making it available’. Much effort of various kinds is currently being directed towards this issue: technologically through growing numbers of publishers’ print on demand programmes, and more practically through the efforts of the Book Rights Registry in the US and the European ARROW project, which hopes to identify rights holders by linking the databases of various EU authority file sources. The potential offer of money from Google for the right to digitise will also of course flush out a number of authors whose works have become orphaned.

However, Drummond’s bland use of the words ‘love’ and ‘care about’ are a sneaky way of drawing the reader into Google’s great conspiracy. Surely the chief reason why there are so many orphan works is that many of them are worthless: worthless to their authors and publishers as commercial opportunities; but also worthless in an absolute sense.

For twenty years between 1970 and 1990 I worked for one of the leading London trade publishers as production director and was responsible for producing many thousands of titles. Yet how many of those titles are remembered now and how many deserve to be? Just a handful: probably fifty at a stretch. The idea that the rest should be brought back from the dead and discovered by a new generation of readers is risible.

Yet the book as icon continues to exercise a powerful influence. In a later incarnation I became involved in a scheme which would have bookshop returns sent to a prison where it would be part of the prisoners’ work to make them unsaleable by drilling a hole through them. The uproar that this proposal provoked focussed almost entirely on the drilling of the hole, invoking parallels with Hitler’s book-burning activities. Prisoners were already destroying CDs by the million and no one turned a hair.

So when you read David Drummond’s closing sentence - ‘Imagine if that information could be made available to everyone, ¬everywhere, at the click of a mouse. Imagine if long-forgotten books could be enjoyed again and could earn new ¬revenues for their authors.’ - remember these are Google’s weasel words and beware.

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