Comments on: Digital Search I: Google Poisons the Well

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:14:17 +0000

First, the books in published form and the books in digital form are very significantly different. That’s the point of digitization, after all.

One library’s collections digitized are also not all libraries (or even just the biggest five or six libraries) collections digitized together. And front-ends matter, too: the point is not merely to digitize but to make searchable. Done in a balkanized or half-implemented fashion, digitization of library collections is not much use. This is why it was a good thing to see Google undertake the job: because they would bring it all together, and couple it to a technically proficient front end design. But having done so, they achieve a kind of momentum, create a path-dependence.

Equally importantly, while the collections of libraries might have been and still are theirs to digitize for the extension of their existing purpose–to disseminate knowledge and make it useful–they are not theirs to give away for the sake of someone else’s profit. That’s part of the obligation of being a non-profit institution, or ought to be: the resources you hold, you hold in trust for your own institutional publics and for the wider public of your society.

By: kentfitch

kentfitch — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:42:47 +0000

“..the whole apparatus has become a gun held permanently to the temple of libraries: work that they formerly owned outright is now rented for variable fees from vendors who are mostly interested in the extension of their own monopolies over information rather than on lowering barriers to use.”

There is no need to be as disingenuous as you claim Brin is: the works Google has digitised are STILL owned outright by the libraries; these libraries are free to digitise them independently, and many do. You don’t lift yourself up by attempting to drag others down: leave Google to their commercial motives and their own consequent problems and do the hard work to create the political space for alternatives.

By: aaron

aaron — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:47:51 +0000

Yeah. I do wonder, though, whether bad digitization is better than no digitization. That’s not a defense of the toolishness of Brin’s argument, but it sometimes seems like the situation we’ve got.

M-net’s African Film Library is a similar sort of situation. I wish the films were available for free, and feel like they should be, but I’ll probably be glad at the opportunity to pay to use them: http://www.techmasai.com/2009/10/m-net-launches-the-african-film-library-the-largest-online-collection-of-african-films-ever-the-problem-is-you-will-have-to-pay-damn/

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:43:18 +0000

Intellectual property law will destroy civilization.

By: Brian Ogilvie

Brian Ogilvie — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:50:22 +0000

Nicely put. I thought it disingenuous, to say the least, that Brin wrote as if he’d never heard of interlibrary loan. I was also pissed off that he relegated serious concerns about bibliographical quality control to the realm of secondary issues that could be fixed in due time. But then I suppose that’s typical of the culture of the public beta (or, too often, public alpha): why spend money doing things right to begin with when you can get users to do it free?

By: evangoer

evangoer — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:43:31 +0000

This is what irks me about the whole discussion — if you’re skeptical about this book deal, you’re an Enemy of Progress who hates the idea of digital libraries and hates children.

Just about everybody wants a digital library in the sky, that would be wonderful. What I haven’t seen yet is a coherent argument that this particular digitization plan is a worthwhile idea. The Perfect might be the enemy of The Good, but so too is The Crappy.