Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization

The Google Books project, a digital library made up of scanned texts from libraries and universities, has received its fair share of coverage in the press and in books about Google generally, like Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) and Ken Auletta’s Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. Here, Marcum and Schonfeld (both of the consultancy Ithaka S+R) give Google Books their full attention, drawing parallels to several predecessor efforts and providing insight as to what might lie ahead. In addition to offering an overview of earlier book digitization efforts and how they relate to Google Books, there are chapters on Google’s recruitment of participant institutions, initial reactions (positive and negative), the Authors Guild v. Google fair use lawsuit and settlement, project leadership from University of Michigan, and the establishment of HathiTrust. Marcum and Schonfeld also reflect on how the goals and outcomes of the Google Books project have influenced the direction of scholarly communications and digital preservation efforts. They effectively argue that although the Google Books project remains controversial, there’s no question that it has massively changed the landscape of digitization.