Google's plan to scan library book collections and make them searchable may be drawing ire from publishers and authors' advocates, but some obscure and first-time writers are lining up on the search engine's side of the dispute -- arguing that the benefits of inclusion in the online database outweigh the drawbacks.
"A cover does sell a book to a certain extent, but once you're intrigued by a cover you want to dig deeper," said Meghann Marco, whose first book, Field Guide to the Apocalypse, was published in May.
Marco said she wanted to include excerpts of her book in the search tool, but her publisher, Simon & Schuster, refused to allow it. Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, said many of its authors do participate in Google Print's opt-in program for publishers, and didn't know why Marco's book wasn't included.
Simon & Schuster is one of five publishing houses that jointly filed a lawsuit against Google last week. The suit charges the search company with willful infringement of copyrights for its Google Print Library Project, which involves four university libraries and the New York Public Library. Google wants to scan all or portions of their collections and add the text to Google Print's searchable database.
The lawsuit complains that the company is including works in its database without copyright owners' permission. The Author's Guild, an advocacy group for published writers, filed a similar suit against Google in September.
Google insists that the library project is legal, noting that it allows copyright holders to opt out of it. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, opined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that scanning whole libraries is probably the only way to ensure that many obscure books can be found. In an interview, a company lawyer echoed the sentiment.
"The world would be a much worse place if the card catalog in a library only contained the books that the publisher had come by and put in," said Alex Macgillivray, an attorney at Google.
And despite the lawsuits, some authors agree with the search giant, and believe that making their work freely searchable online will boost their stature and sales.
"The dike was breached when they invented the Xerox machine and put it in libraries," said Ashton Applewhite, author of Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well. "People who want to steal will always find a way, but I think this is going to tap into a much larger audience."
Others have mixed feelings about the service. James DeLong, who heads the Center for the Study of Digital Property at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a property-rights-oriented think tank, says Google's system seems most appropriate for out-of-print books. "There's a huge backlog of stuff from 1923 to 1995," he said. "Getting anybody to look at them is a really formidable task."
For books less than 10 years old, however, DeLong prefers the opt-in approach adopted by the Open Content Alliance, a project backed by Yahoo and several libraries in which copyright owners must explicitly ask to have their work included in a searchable online archive.
Ben Vershbow, who writes on digital-publishing issues for the Institute for the Future of the Book, says that although he supports Google's ambitious book-scanning agenda, it's understandable that publishers feel threatened by it.
"It is a paradigmatic shift of moving everything to digital," he said. "It's not just the web and print. It's all beginning to merge, and we don't know how that's going to play out in the long run."
Other authors say the issue isn't so much lost sales, but that Google, a for-profit company, is placing entire books in a proprietary search engine without seeking permission from the authors. Google has said it will not sell ads on library pages, but not everyone is reassured.
"Listing my book in a cybercatalog isn't the problem," wrote Ron Franscell, author of two published novels, in an e-mail. "Scanning it fully and owning it without ever paying a royalty is a bigger issue to me."
Fred von Lohmann, attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believes searches conducted using the Google Library Project are unlikely to cut into book sales.
"What Google is offering to do is to provide a couple of sentences on either side of the search term," he said. "It's pretty hard for me to imagine a case where that would be a substitute for buying the book."
Some in the book world have even embraced a strategy of simultaneously publishing online and in print. O'Reilly Media, a supporter of Google's library project, routinely publishes its computer books on a searchable site while simultaneously selling hard-copy editions, and some authors have managed to sell printed books even as they make the same content availably online for free.
And while Google's service may be new, publishers have long made book excerpts available through online booksellers like Amazon.com, and even through Google's publisher program. The idea is that making some content free gets readers to buy more books.
For a first-time author, Marco said, having people read parts of her book online and decide not to buy it isn't the worst thing that could happen. The more disturbing scenario is for no one to read it at all, she said.
"The idea of obscurity being an author's worst enemy is absolutely true."
