In order to subscribe to Google Book Search, research libraries, which had made their holdings available to Google free of charge, would be required to buy back digital versions of their own books at a price set by Google, one that could escalate beyond their ability to pay. A moving wall now keeps all books published since 1927 out of the public domain, but Google has forged ahead, digitizing everything (though without making entire texts available), despite having been sued by rights holders for infringement of copyright.īy agreeing on a settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, Google converted what was originally a free search service involving only snippets from books into a profit-driven commercial library. The recent history of academic books and journals shows how these interests have collided, driven by tectonic shifts in the global order of research and publication.Īs soon as it began to digitize libraries, Google became entangled in copyright law, which protects rights to a book for the life of the author plus seventy years-that is, in most cases, for more than a century. To be sure, the complex realities of technology, publishing, libraries, and authorship cannot be reduced to a Manichaean notion of progressives battling money-grubbers, because most of the participants in the knowledge industries pursue self-interest, whether it is profit or prestige. The world of learning has become a battleground between the opposed forces of democratization and commercialization.

But it touched off an equal and opposite reaction in the form of closed access, paywalls, and monopolies. Digitization promised to open up the world of learning to the excluded and the underprivileged, particularly in developing countries. By digitizing library holdings, Google would create a modern Library of Alexandria: everyone would have free access to all the books in existence. In 2004 Google promised to make that future even brighter. In 1991 the World Wide Web seemed to provide a path to a dazzling future: everyone in the world would be able to communicate, at a minimal cost, with everyone else through the Internet.

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