Google's Clancy Wonders: What Happens To Libraries When Ebooks Predominate?

A pregnant question at the D is for Digitize conference

Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 10/12/2009

• Physical impediment to check out is gone
• How sustain both publishing and library industries?
• We are in the midst of 20 years of change
• A book as a collection of rights?

Among the discussions at the D is for Digitize conference on October 9, Google Book Search point man Dan Clancy posed a question to the audience—including law professors, lawyers, librarians, and various computer science and digital prognosticators—about libraries.

As the digitial books industry moves forward, he said, there will be "huge challenges, especially in terms of libraries and services we’ve come to expect."

"Right now, there are artificial impediments to accessing books from a library," Clancy said, explaining that he himself does not check out books from the library but prefers to buy them online. But he does go to the library with his kids to check out books.

"In a digital world, the library buys a bunch of digital books, and I can go to my iPhone and check [them] out," Clancy suggested.

"Then how do you sustain the publishing market?" he asked. "And how can libraries afford to sustain that type of usage?"

20 years of change
Neither Clancy nor any other participants offered conclusive answers—after all, it was a conference about the Google Book Search Settlement—but it reflected Clancy's observation that society is in the midst of an enormous change regarding books and libraries.

"If we look back in 100 years, we’ll see how in these ten years, and 10 years before us, everything changed," he said.

Radical rethink
"We have to radically relook at what publishing is about," suggested Jim Lichtenberg, a member of the board of directors of the Book Industry Study Group. A book, he mused, may not be a physical book "but you could look at that as a collection of rights," with publishers selling different sets of rights.

Lichtenberg said that the Google settlement has begun to move the mindset of publishers and authors "into a more creative and innovative frame of mind…as opposed to fine lenses of copyright."