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Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization
An incisive history of the controversial Google Books project and the ongoing quest for a universal digital library
Libraries have long talked about providing comprehensive access to information for everyone. But when Google announced in 2004 that it planned to digitize books to make the world's knowledge accessible to all, questions were raised about the roles and responsibilities of libraries, the rights of authors and publishers, and whether a powerful corporation should be the conveyor of such a fundamental public good. Along Came Google traces the history of Google's book digitization project and its implications for us today.
Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld draw on in-depth interviews with those who both embraced and resisted Google's plans, from librarians and technologists to university leaders, tech executives, and the heads of leading publishing houses. They look at earlier digital initiatives to provide open access to knowledge, and describe how Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made the case for a universal digital library and drew on their company's considerable financial resources to make it a reality. Marcum and Schonfeld examine how librarians and scholars organized a legal response to Google, and reveal the missed opportunities when a settlement with the tech giant failed.
Along Came Google sheds light on the transformational effects of the Google Books project on scholarship and discusses how we can continue to think imaginatively and collaboratively about expanding the digital availability of knowledge.
Libraries have long talked about providing comprehensive access to information for everyone. But when Google announced in 2004 that it planned to digitize books to make the world's knowledge accessible to all, questions were raised about the roles and responsibilities of libraries, the rights of authors and publishers, and whether a powerful corporation should be the conveyor of such a fundamental public good. Along Came Google traces the history of Google's book digitization project and its implications for us today.
Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld draw on in-depth interviews with those who both embraced and resisted Google's plans, from librarians and technologists to university leaders, tech executives, and the heads of leading publishing houses. They look at earlier digital initiatives to provide open access to knowledge, and describe how Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made the case for a universal digital library and drew on their company's considerable financial resources to make it a reality. Marcum and Schonfeld examine how librarians and scholars organized a legal response to Google, and reveal the missed opportunities when a settlement with the tech giant failed.
Along Came Google sheds light on the transformational effects of the Google Books project on scholarship and discusses how we can continue to think imaginatively and collaboratively about expanding the digital availability of knowledge.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published September 21, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 3, 2022
Illusions of book digitization
This book focuses on the history of a universal digital library, and specifically focus on the entry of Google into the library arena with promise of making global books available online. Several leading academic institutions and public libraries eagerly joined this effort to accelerate the digital activity. They embraced the concept of a universal library and began advocating for change to disseminate the information, literacy, information access, policy awareness, digital preservation, collaboration, information access and control. On December 14, 2004, Google stunned the library, technology, and copyright worlds announcing that it would start scanning millions of books from leading research libraries to create a comprehensive database of books that would be available online. But this plan did not protect authors, which precluded them from earning a return on their investments of time, efforts, and knowledge which were essential to free flow of ideas. Google’s goal was to create an unrivaled digital library that would draw users to its website, strengthen its dominance of search-engine market, expand the client niche, and increase its advertising revenue. The libraries also wanted to digitize their collections but could not do themselves because of possible copyright violations and financial resources.
Google had scanned about 20 million books, and it displayed snippets - short passages in Google online searches. It gave digital copies to libraries for their own use, in payment for their cooperation for loaning their books for digitization. The Authors Guild acted against Google Books, in the Second Circuit Court of New York, the court ruled in an unprecedented expansion of the “Fair Use” doctrine that Google’s copying and providing access to some four million copyrighted books for profit-making purposes was a “Fair Use.” The court was blinded by Google’s “public benefit” arguments, calling scanning a copyrighted book is a “Fair Use.” On April 18, 2016, the Supreme Court declined to review that decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the landmark copyright infringement lawsuit, Authors Guild v. Google. The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case leaves in place the “Fair Use” doctrine and let Google have its way.
Google with unlimited engineering and financial resources supported their aspirations and digitization went unhinged. But the digital transformation has led to tensions between global and domestic issues. Universal access and tech-controlled filter bubble, between freedom and control, between openness and truth, information and disinformation have made their way in an unprecedented way. Recently, Google threatened to demonetize publishers using its advertisement network if the publishers’ dissent from regime change idea for Russia. Similar threats were made by Google against publishers who accurately reported on BLM – ANTIFA riots across the country. In his book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has described the ways Google and Big Tech giants have been using heavy-handedness in pushing their own liberal and progressive ideas through their platforms. Shadow banning conservative ideas in Wikipedia and Google searches have become well-known in recent years.
The authors of this book lack focus in narrating the history of book digitization, one chapter does not flow well into the next chapter. Chapters are open-ended with no conclusions. In chapter 7, the authors examine the role of Hathi Trust as an alternative to a universal library. It is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books. But the financial resources and the possible cooperation with other large libraries is unsure. And the fact that it still depends on Google Books for digitized content makes it less of an alternative for Google Books.
This book focuses on the history of a universal digital library, and specifically focus on the entry of Google into the library arena with promise of making global books available online. Several leading academic institutions and public libraries eagerly joined this effort to accelerate the digital activity. They embraced the concept of a universal library and began advocating for change to disseminate the information, literacy, information access, policy awareness, digital preservation, collaboration, information access and control. On December 14, 2004, Google stunned the library, technology, and copyright worlds announcing that it would start scanning millions of books from leading research libraries to create a comprehensive database of books that would be available online. But this plan did not protect authors, which precluded them from earning a return on their investments of time, efforts, and knowledge which were essential to free flow of ideas. Google’s goal was to create an unrivaled digital library that would draw users to its website, strengthen its dominance of search-engine market, expand the client niche, and increase its advertising revenue. The libraries also wanted to digitize their collections but could not do themselves because of possible copyright violations and financial resources.
Google had scanned about 20 million books, and it displayed snippets - short passages in Google online searches. It gave digital copies to libraries for their own use, in payment for their cooperation for loaning their books for digitization. The Authors Guild acted against Google Books, in the Second Circuit Court of New York, the court ruled in an unprecedented expansion of the “Fair Use” doctrine that Google’s copying and providing access to some four million copyrighted books for profit-making purposes was a “Fair Use.” The court was blinded by Google’s “public benefit” arguments, calling scanning a copyrighted book is a “Fair Use.” On April 18, 2016, the Supreme Court declined to review that decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the landmark copyright infringement lawsuit, Authors Guild v. Google. The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case leaves in place the “Fair Use” doctrine and let Google have its way.
Google with unlimited engineering and financial resources supported their aspirations and digitization went unhinged. But the digital transformation has led to tensions between global and domestic issues. Universal access and tech-controlled filter bubble, between freedom and control, between openness and truth, information and disinformation have made their way in an unprecedented way. Recently, Google threatened to demonetize publishers using its advertisement network if the publishers’ dissent from regime change idea for Russia. Similar threats were made by Google against publishers who accurately reported on BLM – ANTIFA riots across the country. In his book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has described the ways Google and Big Tech giants have been using heavy-handedness in pushing their own liberal and progressive ideas through their platforms. Shadow banning conservative ideas in Wikipedia and Google searches have become well-known in recent years.
The authors of this book lack focus in narrating the history of book digitization, one chapter does not flow well into the next chapter. Chapters are open-ended with no conclusions. In chapter 7, the authors examine the role of Hathi Trust as an alternative to a universal library. It is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books. But the financial resources and the possible cooperation with other large libraries is unsure. And the fact that it still depends on Google Books for digitized content makes it less of an alternative for Google Books.
October 11, 2021
I was really bummed out by this book. As someone who knows more than most people about this subject, I can say that this author gets a lot wrong (it says Google didn't win its fair use case, when in fact it did!) and leaves out some very important pieces (why not talk about the lawsuit the Authors Guild brought against HathiTrust? why not mention the role of European governments in bringing down the Google Books Settlement? why say mass library digitization is dead when hundreds of libraries around the country are still doing it collaboratively?). Just because Google didn't finish the job doesn't mean the dream of our digital library future is dead. I think this book is a real missed opportunity to tell a much more hopeful story.
Read
November 20, 2022Quite a life-event, that moment you read a book about things you have lived through in your working life. It brought back a lot of memories of spirited discussions about right and wrong, digital chances and fears. The changing focus of research libraries (of which the KB, my employer, is one). In 2011, we first loaned out more digital copies than physical ones. And it is the same year the Google settlement was rejected in court. With it a chance to digitize millions of twentieth century, in copyright books was rejected. There still is a question how many 'libraries of record' will remain in place for the physical and digital collections. It is a very good thing this story is told - the position of Michigan as a lead player in the field and its Provost Courant, as a far-seeing individual. As is Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. It is an institutional story, as put down in this book. In which the public ultimately ends up losing.
Libraries already collaborated in the scholarly ecosystem by providing high quality metadata. The painful transition to online cataloguing is described. Libraries used to focus on preservation and their own communities - both not really tenable as an institutional policy after 2000. It is telling that the authors end up being surprised by the degree to which change has occurred. Only at the very end do they conclude: the test will not lie in the strengths of libraries as organizations but rather in the social responsibility for intellectual authority and intellectual freedom. Even that is, to me, a channeling of the scope towards a smaller community than libraries could serve. Development, not authority or freedom.
Institutional barriers and lack of imagination or courage have deprived society of much that could have been good. A useful book and this all is notwithstanding what is achieved: HathiTrust primarily. To be continued...
Libraries already collaborated in the scholarly ecosystem by providing high quality metadata. The painful transition to online cataloguing is described. Libraries used to focus on preservation and their own communities - both not really tenable as an institutional policy after 2000. It is telling that the authors end up being surprised by the degree to which change has occurred. Only at the very end do they conclude: the test will not lie in the strengths of libraries as organizations but rather in the social responsibility for intellectual authority and intellectual freedom. Even that is, to me, a channeling of the scope towards a smaller community than libraries could serve. Development, not authority or freedom.
Institutional barriers and lack of imagination or courage have deprived society of much that could have been good. A useful book and this all is notwithstanding what is achieved: HathiTrust primarily. To be continued...
March 10, 2025
This book is a history of American (academic, publishing, etc.) politics that shaped digitisation and digital libraries in the US. What this book is not, is a "[a]n incisive history of the controversial Google Books project and the ongoing quest for a universal digital library".
What the book does, it does reasonably well. But it's important to realise it is very, very heavily US-focused, and much of it isn't about Google Books (and a lot of it seems to be about giving credit to individual people). You could finish this book believing Google did zero digitisation outside of the US. For a book that talks about an 'universal library' so much, it seems like a huge oversight that nothing was mentioned (the rather patronising 2 pages about 'concerns' from Europe don't count).
What the book does, it does reasonably well. But it's important to realise it is very, very heavily US-focused, and much of it isn't about Google Books (and a lot of it seems to be about giving credit to individual people). You could finish this book believing Google did zero digitisation outside of the US. For a book that talks about an 'universal library' so much, it seems like a huge oversight that nothing was mentioned (the rather patronising 2 pages about 'concerns' from Europe don't count).
November 22, 2021
A bit dry in places, but an informative book on academic library digitization. As someone who works with public libraries, I was disappointed in the narrow academic library focus, but it was still enlightening and will help me with my own digitization projects in the future.
November 23, 2021
As a librarian, I was familiar with many of these details but I had never seen them put together in such a coherent and well told story, from early library efforts to build collective infrastructure for resource sharing and digitization to google’s massive disruption to the more deliberate and institutionalized efforts of HathiTrust. In addition, the most valuable new contribution may be the information gleaned from many interviews with people directly involved with these changes.
A final note: I’m not in a position to fact check the book, but another reviewer lists a variety of things they say the book doesn’t address that in fact it does talk about. You can disagree with the authors’ interpretations but you won’t walk away without having learned something.
A final note: I’m not in a position to fact check the book, but another reviewer lists a variety of things they say the book doesn’t address that in fact it does talk about. You can disagree with the authors’ interpretations but you won’t walk away without having learned something.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews