At Panel on Google Book Settlement, Support, Criticism, Contentiousness

Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 1/29/2009

• Pricing issues unresolved
• Is public library access “product placement”?
• Will city managers think Google is a library?

(For a set of links, go to LibraryJournal.com/GoogleBookSearchSettlement.)

In a lively, sometimes contentious discussion Saturday at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Denver, Dan Clancy, engineering director for the Google Book Search Project, diligently explicated the proposed settlement with publishers and authors over books scanned from libraries, but was unable to answer some pressing questions from librarians, noting that the settlement itself remains unresolved. 

While the cost for institutional subscriptions to the entire database would be based on FTE students, Clancy was not ready to talk pricing. Paul Courant, dean of libraries at the University of Michigan, a partner in the Google product, acknowledged that pricing was key, but speculated that the “pricing’s going to be pretty good,” because the retail market places a limit on institutional prices and Google’s business model is “eyeballs on their pages.” 

Moreover, should prices be too high for the database, he said, “We’re no worse off. It just becomes a richer finding tool, better than search and snippet.”

Laura Quilter, a librarian and attorney, was a bit less optimistic. “The pricing is clearly set up in favor of the rights holders,” she warned.

Clancy later said he was surprised no one had pointed out that, for consumers, rights holders can set a price of zero and display the book under a Creative Commons license. “My personal feeling is there are more than enough rights holders” who don’t consider books their main income and “who will just want their books read."

Better than alternative
While Courant acknowledged compromises in the settlement, he suggested that, not only did it obviate the need for libraries to negotiate individually, but no one else would have done it, taking aim at the idea, “very nicely articulated by Bob Darnton in the New York Review of Books," that the library community could have achieved a similar result. 

“The world I live in was not going to produce that,” he said. “The key issue is that literature of most of the 20th century is unfindable and undigitized.”

Public access service
Along with institutional subscriptions, Google would offer free (but limited) access, per-book retail purchase, and a public access model with at least one terminal in a public library building, with the number of free terminals in universities based on the student body. While there’s a per-page printing fee, Google has agreed to pay the cost for first five years, up to $3 million, to test the market.

Karen Coyle, digital librarian and consultant, cautioned, “I really think we have to look a gift horse in the mouth.” She suggested that it would be difficult to manage and that users would ask for more: “I’m very much afraid it’s really an act of product placement.”

Quilter agreed the workstation would be difficult to manage and pointed out that school libraries are left out of the settlement. Clancy commented that he has never personally considered the free access terminal as “manna from heaven” but rather “something that ensures some degree of access.”

Quality issues
“We have to ask the quality question,” Coyle said, recalling that libraries had to work with abstracting and indexing vendors to improve quality. 

Google, said Clancy, has “spent a great deal of time improving technology,” involving both the image quality and algorithms for processing. “We feel capture is adequate for uses we envision,” he said. “We’re not trying to preserve the artifact. We’re trying to make sure readers can read it and access it.”

He noted that the image seen on the web may not be the highest resolution Google has because of download time. “Early on, we were scanning every book twice,” he said, noting that Google’s algorithms got better at detecting blurry pages. As problems crop up, he said, “one thing we’re working on with our library partners is a method to scan individual pages.”.

Privacy issues
Coyle noted that public institutions, unlike Google, have greater concerns about user privacy and transparency, and the negotiations were secret and the “only mention of confidentiality in the agreement is for rights holders,” meaning that libraries will have to negotiate that for their users. Similarly, libraries will have to ensure that the database is ADA-accessible. 

Clancy acknowledged that libraries won’t enter into an agreement that doesn’t protect privacy and that Google would take its cue from services that the library market has already obtained.

Quilter noted that, while librarians are among Google’s biggest fans, they must maintain their presence and not be “reliant on the kindness of Google.” She said libraries would be limited in using copies for ILL, course management, and e reserves, and offering off-site access.

Free to all?
Mitch Freedman, past president of ALA, wondered about changes to the “free to all” ideology of libraries, asking whether Google would permit, as do other databases, site licenses for public libraries. Clancy said that, given the consumer market, there was no agreement on remote access, but that could change down the road. “Authors and publishers were not comfortable with remote access.”

While Freedman said that issue was resolved with database publishers, Clancy responded that those publishers don’t have a model aimed at consumers. He noted that “the challenge of selling into this market is not Google’s core competence,” so consortial discounts are authorized in the agreement.

Coyle acknowledged that the future was unpredictable, but Google could drop the product if it doesn’t perform economically, or it could become very popular, leading to a “parallel system.” 

“We know Google isn’t a library,” she observed, “but my fear is that city managers, in tight budget times, don’t know that Google isn’t a library.”

Clancy said that, while some people have talked about Google Book Search leading university libraries to ditch books, it would be very unwise. “The negotiation power you have is in part because you have the physical books,” he said. 

The fair use issue
Courant acknowledged the copyright issue. “Many people, including to some extent myself, were wistful, when the settlement was announced, because we were going to nail down a powerful position on fair use and indexing, and [having] snippets was a tremendous boon to having an accessible card catalog,”  he said.

Books removed
As for books Google has removed for editorial reasons, Courant said, “we’re going to have to live in a somewhat mixed environment… We also hold a lot of digitized product not in Google. If we don’t have a scan, we’ll scan it ourselves, or get it from Brewster [Kahle]” of the Internet Archive, a fierce critic of the Google project who was listening intently in the audience. 

Clancy noted that, according to the agreement, should Google restrict anything for editorial reasons—he said pornography has been cited as an example, but “at this point, we have no plans for anything like that”—the scan would be made available so libraries can work with the registry to provide access.

Special collections
Nancy Davenport of the District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) wondered if, in the absence of a licensing agreement, she could as a consumer buy access to books  DCPL sought for a special collection of local history. 

“Right now, the agreement does not consider institutional purchase” of individual books, Clancy acknowledged. “The creation of the registry allows us to consider new models.” He said he believed there will be a demand for such models, and “then it’s in the interest of rights holders that we work to offer such a product.”

New devices
Charles Lowry, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, asked if there would be provisions for new technologies, such as digital readers. 

The agreement is designed so the registry can authorize new business models, Clancy said, noting that 98% of the agreement was finished a year and a half ago, before the Kindle came out and before other readers became prominent. “If the market demands it, it’s reasonable to expect that registry will be interested in it.”

Coyle cautioned that the books presented online are not ebooks but photographs of pages of books, with their own constraints.

The Kahle challenge
Near the end of the Q&A, Kahle posed a series of questions, getting Clancy to acknowledge that no other registry can serve the same role, that the registry can be modified, and that—as with other class-action settlements—it was negotiated under a non-disclosure agreement.

Does the settlement, Kahle asked Courant, make it more difficult for others to enter the arena of out-of-print digital book provisioning? 

“My completely amateur opinion is, yeah,” Courant responded.

After the session, Kahle told LJ that “there are other venues and other meetings that will help people understand what the world’s going to look like in five years if we either go with Google library or a library system that we grew up with. Do you get both, or is it really exclusive?”

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