From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Strangers in the Stacks
Google removes one more brick in the library wall. Good for them.
In the 19th century, immigrant entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie began spending some of the money he made in the steel business to build 2,509 public libraries throughout the English-speaking world. A self-made man, he wanted to give working people access to learning.
In the 21st century, immigrant entrepreneur Sergey Brin and his business partner, Larry Page, are revisiting the venture, except that their company, Google, will spend millions to break down library walls. Google announced this week that it will team up with some leading research libraries to digitize vast swaths of their holdings and make them available to everyone--free--via Google's Web site.
"Within two decades," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University's head librarian, "most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes, for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today."
It is hard to overstate the momentousness of this idea. First, Google's plan drives a giant nail in the coffin of paper books. Right now, it is true, e-book sales remain negligible. But just as electronic payments are gradually superseding paper checks, electronic publication will gradually replace paper books--especially in a future of portable, easy-to-read electronic tablets and near-ubiquitous wireless Internet access. (Just this week, the Federal Communications Commission approved Wi-Fi aboard aircraft.)
For libraries, Google's announcement raises some big questions, starting with: Just what the heck is a library anyway? Must it involve a building? And if everyone can access everything electronically, isn't one library enough? "Most people assume the building with the lions out front has a future only as a museum," says Larry Lannom, director of information management technology at the nonprofit Corporation for National Research Initiatives.
Then there is the matter of preservation. When you put your family's photos on a CD-ROM, or back up your precious diary pages on a floppy disk, you probably feel confident that you've sent them safely into the future. In fact, though, there is no proven way of preserving digital data from the twin plagues of media deterioration and changing technological standards. Even if a disk survives, in other words, the question remains: Will anyone in 100 years have a machine that can read it? Says Mr. Lannom: "All the problems associated with digital libraries are wrapped up in archiving."
Google's announcement raises questions as well about how authors and publishers will be compensated, or what future publishers will do. If everyone can access everything freely online--a condition still a long way off--what will it mean to "sell" a copy of something? As things stand, the spending decisions of publishers (and librarians) grant a kind of imprimatur to printed works, legitimizing them for the sphere of public discourse. Who will fill this function in the future? Should anyone?
Imponderables aside, one of the most interesting aspects of Google's venture is that, like Carnegie's, it is the product of private initiative. These days it is fashionable to condemn the culture marketplace for trash television, tabloid journalism and obscene popular music, and for good reason. But Google's announcement reminds us that the market makes a space for knowledge and intellectual culture, too, and gives us amazingly easy access to it. Thus it is especially fitting that Google's actions arise not from the will of one ruthless individual distributing his accumulated wealth but from the deployment of shareholder funds freely invested in a company known for treating its employees decently. Google's plan, in short, joins commerce and technology to democratize knowledge.
Hardly anywhere is this longstanding democratic trend more evident than in the book business, where technology has made publishing so easy that in 2003 the number of new titles rose 19% from a year earlier to reach 175,000, according to Stephanie Oda, co-publisher of Subtext, an industry newsletter. Those dreaded superstores, meanwhile, have brought a huge supply of books to shopping areas across America.
If the local store doesn't have what you want, there is always Amazon.com, which has played a major role in making books affordable and putting their contents within range of Everyman. Steve Coffman, a vice president at the Germantown, Md.-based Library Systems & Services LLC, contends that Amazon has created what is arguably the world's greatest library catalog, one accessible at all times, from anywhere, at no charge. Amazon also can deliver books at a lower cost than many interlibrary-loan systems.
Amazon is also one of the major players in the Internet's burgeoning used-book market, along with others such as Half.com and Alibris, and meta-sites such as Bookfinder.com. Taken together, these outfits have matched buyers everywhere with used bookstores and individual sellers all over North America. Never before have books been more readily and cheaply available. I recently bought Ann Marlowe's memoir of addiction, "How to Stop Time," for $2.96 and Thomas Mallon's novel "Bandbox" for $2.82. Both were hardcovers; the second was even signed by the author. The Internet used-book market has also practically eradicated the tragedy--for authors and readers alike--of a volume being "out of print." A market offering very inexpensive (and often older) books serves a function that libraries once did.
Private-sector investment in technology has been democratizing knowledge for a long time--think of the telegraph or high-speed newspaper printing--but it's hard to think of a time when you got so much for so little. Part of the credit, it should be said, belongs to the government-funded research that got the Internet going in the first place. Computers and information are cheap enough now to be within the reach of almost everyone in the industrialized world and a good many people beyond. This Christmas season the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which typically costs more than $1,000 in 32 volumes, can be had on CD-ROM from Amazon for about $25.
Since Google's new venture will know no borders, it will eventually make America's college research libraries available to people all over the world. Lots of poor countries will become free riders, sure, but we will benefit from this as much as they will. Economics is not a zero-sum game; to the extent that American knowledge can help alleviate foreign poverty, it will make us richer financially as well as morally.
Finally, there is the question of what it all means for librarians. My bet is that the need for their services will increase even as the venue for what they do changes. "Eventually," Mr. Lannom says of the physical library, "it will go away. The skills librarians bring in organizing and making accessible the ongoing cultural record of humanity will probably change, but they will endure." Who knows? In an information economy, the work of a librarian may some day pay so well that people will go into it for the money.
Mr. Akst is a writer in Tivoli, N.Y.
