Despite Google the printed book will live forever — but differently

The articles are coming thick and fast suggesting that the printed book is in danger. A declaration of interest: the writer has been a publisher all his life and has published, literally, hundreds, perhaps thousands of titles. He is still a publisher and journalist.

Unbound was an invitation-only conference at the New York Public Library. One important guest was Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, a book about the new business economics of the net. This book, The Long Tail, is quite critical in viewing the future of the book and cannot be commended too highly.

A good start was made by Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe when he said, ‘The majority of information lies outside the Internet.’ At the moment, this is true, how long that will last is open for discussion.

Unbound was yet another chess move in the great game being played between libraries (and as serious supporters book publishers) v Google and other organizations which would like to digitize all information.

Google’s stated mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Which carries with it the idea that the user of the information does not pay. To all publishers and many librarians this is far from being a good idea.

The University of Hong Kong fights tooth and nail to stop anyone reproducing an old map of China because it claims it has copyright and if you want it on the Internet you must pay. How anyone can claim copyright in such an ancient work wonders me but the fact is the person who is the librarian there feels he should protect the information for the great unwashed. Many librarians feel the same.

The job Google is attempting is massive. It is cleaning out the Augean stables. It is trying to make information, which some libraries guard as if it were theirs, widely available.

In December 2004, Google announced it had made a deal with five libraries — the New York Public Library, the universities of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford — to scan their stocks, making their contents available online via Google Book Search. That would probably be of the close order of 30 million books.
And Microsoft is scanning 100,000 books in for the British Library.

None of this even scratches what is available. One simple statistic will do – there are over one million unpublished doctoral theses as yet unpublished, leave alone scanned in.

The problem that all this runs up against is copyright, intellectual property. Plainly out-of-copyright books are not affected. If the author has been dead 70 years normally you can go straight ahead. (There are some minor exceptions but they are definitely exceptions.)

The British — at Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the British Library and perhaps others — are being cautious in allowing only the scanning of out-of-copyright books. In truth this has little effect for the works which are in copyright almost certainly exist in the printed form in American libraries.

Book publishers, especially American book publishers, are not happy about this. The problem is something called ‘fair dealing’ or ‘fair use’. It is perfectly acceptable to quote from part of a published work for the purposes of, say, criticism and review. Normally, in an English court that would be accepted as being a few paragraphs. Not more.

In the United States the law is interpreted more liberally. Google thought that keeping the amount of the book available to 20% would keep everyone happy. It did not.

The Authors Guild, supported by the Association of American Publishers, started a class action suit against Google and, given the parties involved, this will end up in the Supreme Court and the ruling will have an immense effect on authorship and publishing.

When Google made its 2004 announcement, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, wrote a short book, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge. It is a call to the barricades. Jeanneney sees the Google project as an act of American cultural imperialism. He believes Google gives the books of the English-speaking world overwhelming priority.

The French, generally, are totally livid that their publishing houses have gone from being seriously important after World War II into a publishing footnote if we are talking of books published in French. In publishing it is the English language all the way. This pleases not the French.

There are other quibbles that a search engine — Google — is not an index. Which is sort of true but converting Google results into an index is a trivial task and undoubtedly will happen.

There are also doubts being raised as to how this will affect university study although this is an argument that is difficult to follow. Bill Gates expects in the very near future that Microsoft will be able to give all undergraduates a $400 hand-held device that will contain all the text books they need for their course. And, what pray is the problem with that?

To quote another writer: ‘We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books, the primary experience and foundation of civilization for the last 500 years.’ Which is such nonsense it takes the breath away.

At this New York conference David Worlock of Electronic Publishing Services said, ‘Ultimately it’s not up to Google or the publishers to decide how books will be read. It’s the readers who will have the final say.’

Got it in one. There is an argument that teachers will have the final say but I think it incorrect. The reader is the final arbiter. To which I can add some information.

More and more books  — as you know books  — are published every year but less and less copies of each title are sold. It used to be a book would get to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and stay there for months, perhaps a year. No longer. Two weeks at best. When I published paperbacks in Britain any run of the mill title had a print run of 30,000 sales of 28,000. Now a reasonable sale would be 5,000 copies.

But because of improvements in print technology the number of copies you have to print has come down. Lightning Source in both the United States and Britain and, my favorite, Lulu in the United States, lets you print one copy at a time. And perhaps make a small profit if you publish and sell twenty copies.

Coming up into our sights is the electronic book. It does not work properly as yet. Sony has done two launches. One all Japanese, the other currently on sale in the United States. As a first attempt it is sort of praiseworthy. But it will not sell in large numbers because it is too damn expensive and the refresh rate is too slow. Almost every computer company I know is experimenting in this area. So in two years time what Sony promises, but as yet does not deliver, will come to pass. And we will be able to carry all the books we could desire in an electronic device.

Will this mean the death of the book trade? No. It means the book trade will have to change, metamorphose, get with the flow. As Mark Twain, although he was not talking about the printed book, said:  ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’ 

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• Google tries its book project at Princeton
• Microsoft to book publishers: don’t trust Google with copyright
• Google Book Search legal issues spread to Europe
• Justice department investigates Google Book Search
• Justice department still has nose in Google Books