LJ Talks to Tony Sanfilippo

Andrew Richard Albanese -- Library Journal, 12/6/2005

In May of 2005, Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses put 16 pointed questions to Google about its plan to scan books from university libraries. To date, Google hasn't answered fully, leaving open a number of thorny issues surrounding a plan that both excites and worries university press officials. Penn State University Press director Tony Sanfilippo has been one of the more vocal critics of the Google plan. LJ's Andrew Richard Albanese caught up with Sanfilippo to get one university press' take on Google's library scanning.

Communication about the publisher program has been great, the library program, not so much. They haven't really discussed it with us at all. We have been told what will happen but there isn't a discussion. That's been a major part of the problem. Publishers have had no voice in that project.

You've been a vocal critic on editorial pages of the Google Program, even while acknowledging the plan's potential benefits. What do you see as the major problems with the project for your press?

We, like most presses our size, don't have digital versions of the majority of what we've published in our fifty year history. Now, both Google and five of our best customers will, but we still won't. We are attempting to digitize those books so we can offer them for sale electronically and bring them back into print. What Google is doing compromises that effort. In a September Publishers Weekly Soapbox piece, I proposed Google negotiate a license to make those two copies in exchange for a third copy we could have. No money exchanges hands, just give us a copy of our own content. The fact that Google won't even consider that leaves me suspicious. The only reason I can think of that Google wouldn't want publishers to have these digital assets is because then we could compete with Google. Not just on search, but also on content distribution which, I suspect, is what they ultimately want those files for. They aren't a public service, they're a publicly held company. This needs to generate revenue for them somehow.

Have you engaged the Penn State library staff about the project, and if so, what have those discussions been like?

Not personally, but our Director and Associate Director have. Of course our librarians love the project but they also seem to recognize our concerns as legitimate. We do differ on our projected outcome of the lawsuits. We think the publishers will prevail, they're not so sure.

How burdensome do you see the opt-out provision offered by Google in practice? Is this more a philosophical issue, or is it in practice a real issue for presses, especially UPs with limited staff and means?

We started publishing in 1955. We got our first database in 1990. We have no complete list to give Google. Not of our entire publishing history. Again, why couldn't Google tell us what they propose to scan? They have the electronic records of the participating libraries, couldn't they send me those lists? This was a great opportunity to create the most reliable publishing database ever imagined, finally giving us a tool to address the issue of orphaned works, and Google chose not to take it, seemingly to avoid dealing with publishers. Wouldn't such a database have been an excellent inaugural project for Google Base instead of the porn spam depository it has become?

Have you engaged your authors on the Google subject, and if so, what have their reactions been like? Can you characterize any positions for and/or against?

Those who have found their books in the publisher program have been delighted. Of course those books are still in print and there is the potential we can sell them. The majority of all of the books we've ever published, however, are now out of print and thus we can't sell them. To my knowledge, Google hasn't included that category yet in the Books program—in copyright but out of print. I'm not sure how an author will react when they do. My guess is they will ask us to bring their book back into print. If only we had the files to make that possible.