Google Print revisited

I'd vaguely registered the American publishing industry's legal challenge to Google Print, but not looked properly at what Google's proposals involved. Scanning the contents of books held in public libraries, in order to make them available online - right? Wrong. Well, not exactly wrong, but seriously incomplete.

An article by Prof. Tim Wu, Leggo My Ego: Google Print and the other culture war spells out & challenges that assumption:

There's a key difference between Google "Print" and the regular Google "Web." On the Web search, if you find something, you can then just click through to the Web page. But using Google Print is different - you only get the results. To get the "full" result, you actually have to buy the book. This is a common misunderstanding about Google Print - it is a way to search books, not a way to get books for free. It is not, in short, Napster for books.

Wu argues convincingly that this is part of a web-driven shift from "a culture of control" to "a culture of exposure". He draws a useful analogy with map-making: if cartographers had to seek the permission of every individual property owner to include their land on maps, what chance would there be of having complete, affordable maps?

Just as maps do not compete with or replace property, neither do book searches replace books. Both are just tools for finding what is otherwise hard to find.

He concludes by pointing out that it's in authors' interests to make their books easy to find, if books are to continue competing successfully with the web as a publishing medium.

Given Google Print's potential value to online learners, I'm happy to have had my eyes opened by this defence of what it really involves.