Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate
Product Manager, Google Print Team
You may have read about the AAP's lawsuit announced today which
objects to Google Print. We'll post our comments about that
soon. Meanwhile, we offer this commentary from Eric Schmidt. It ran
on the op-ed page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal, and we are
reprinting it in full with that paper's permission.
Books of Revelation
By Eric Schmidt
The Wall Street
Journal
October 18, 2005
Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second,
searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an
historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the
Battle of Algiers. Imagine a high school student in Bangladesh
discovering an out-of-print author held only in a library in Ann
Arbor. Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the
world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by
anyone, anywhere, anytime.
That's the vision behind Google Print, a program we introduced
last fall to help users search through the oceans of information
contained in the world's books. Recently, some members of the
publishing industry who believe this program violates copyright law
have been fighting to stop it. We respectfully disagree with their
conclusions, on both the meaning of the law and the spirit of a
program which, in fact, will enhance the value of each copyright.
Here's why.
Google's job is to help people find information. Google
Print's job is to make it easier for people to find books. When
you do a Google search, your results now include pointers to those
books whose contents, stored in the Google Print index, contain
your search terms. For many books, these results will, like an
ordinary card catalog, contain basic bibliographic information and,
at most, a few lines of text where your search terms appear.
We show more than this basic information only if a book is in the
public domain, or if the copyright owner has explicitly allowed it
by adding this title to the Publisher Program (most major U.S. and
U.K. publishers have signed up). We refer people who discover books
through Google Print to online retailers, but we don't make a
penny on referrals. We also don't place ads on Google Print
pages for books from our Library Project, and we do so for books in
our Publishing Program only with the permission of publishers, who
receive the majority of the resulting revenue. Any copyright holder
can easily exclude their titles from Google Print — no lawsuit is
required.
This policy is entirely in keeping with our main Web search engine.
In order to guide users to the information they're looking for,
we copy and index all the Web sites we find. If we didn't, a
useful search engine would be impossible, and the same dynamic
applies to the Google Print Library Project. By most estimates,
less than 20% of books are in print, and only around 20% of titles,
according to the Online Computer Library Center, are in the public
domain. This leaves a startling 60% of all books that publishers
are unlikely to be able to add to our program and readers are
unlikely to find. Only by physically scanning and indexing every
word of the extraordinary collections of our partner libraries at
Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library and Harvard
can we make all these lost titles discoverable with the level of
comprehensiveness that will make Google Print a world-changing
resource. But just as any Web site owner who doesn't want to be
included in our main search index is welcome to exclude pages from
his site, copyright-holders are free to send us a list of titles
that they don't want included in the Google Print index.
For some, this isn't enough. The program's critics maintain
that any use of their books requires their permission. We have the
utmost respect for the intellectual and creative effort that lies
behind every grant of copyright. Copyright law, however, is all
about which uses require permission and which don't; and we
believe (and have structured Google Print to ensure) that the use
we make of books we scan through the Library Project is consistent
with the Copyright Act, whose "fair use" balancing of the
rights of copyright-holders with the public benefits of free
expression and innovation allows a wide range of activity, from
book quotations in reviews to parodies of pop songs — all without
copyright-holder permission.
Even those critics who understand that copyright law is not
absolute argue that making a full copy of a given work, even just
to index it, can never constitute fair use. If this were so, you
wouldn't be able to record a TV show to watch it later or use a
search engine that indexes billions of Web pages. The aim of the
Copyright Act is to protect and enhance the value of creative works
in order to encourage more of them — in this case, to ensure that
authors write and publishers publish. We find it difficult to
believe that authors will stop writing books because Google Print
makes them easier to find, or that publishers will stop selling
books because Google Print might increase their sales.
Indeed, some of Google Print's primary beneficiaries will be
publishers and authors themselves. Backlist titles comprise the
vast majority of books in print and a large portion of many
publishers' profits, but just a fraction of their marketing
budgets. Google Print will allow those titles to live forever, just
one search away from being found and purchased. Some authors are
already seeing the benefits. When Cardinal Ratzinger became pope,
millions of people who searched his name saw the Google Print
listing for his book "In the Beginning" (Wm. B. Eerdmans)
in their results. Thousands of them looked at a page or two from
the book; clicks on the title's "Buy this Book" links
increased tenfold.
That's the heart of the Google Print mission. Imagine the
cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously
inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is
searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World
and Third, en toute langue — and all, of course, entirely for
free. How many users will find, and then buy, books they never
could have discovered any other way? How many out-of-print and
backlist titles will find new and renewed sales life? How many
future authors will make a living through their words solely
because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered
audience to find them? This egalitarianism of information dispersal
is precisely what the Web is best at; precisely what leads to
powerful new business models for the creative community; precisely
what copyright law is ultimately intended to support; and, together
with our partners, precisely what we hope, and expect, to
accomplish with Google Print.
Mr. Schmidt is CEO of Google.
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