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September 12, 2015 04:00 pm

What Ever Happened To Google Books?

An anonymous reader writes: Tim Wu at the New Yorker wonders about the present and future of Google Books. He calls it the most ambitious library project of our time — it seemed so promising when it started. Google developed the requisite technology, made the necessary partnerships to get it done, and put ridiculous amounts of effort into it. Despite their accomplishment, Google Books is merely a shadow of what it could have been. They just couldn't fight through the intellectual property issues that arose. "If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people's work. Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it's Google. For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded, particularly when it came to weighing abstract and mainly worthless rights against the public's interest in gaining access to obscure works. Finally, the outside critics and the courts were entirely too sanguine about killing, as opposed to improving, a settlement that took so many years to put together, effectively setting the project back a decade if not longer."

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