Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web

Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web NY TIMES

October 22, 2007
Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web
By KATIE HAFNER

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google
and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they
are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new
digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston
area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a
nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of
terms, which include making the material unavailable to other
commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on
the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by
contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

Google pays to scan the books and does not directly profit from the
resulting Web pages, although the books make its search engine more
useful and more valuable. The libraries can have their books scanned
again by another company or organization for dissemination more broadly.

It costs the Open Content Alliance as much as $30 to scan each book,
a cost shared by the group’s members and benefactors, so there are
obvious financial benefits to libraries of Google’s wide-ranging offer,
started in 2004.

Many prominent libraries have accepted Google’s offer — including
the New York Public Library and libraries at the University of
Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15
million books from those collections over the next decade.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public
Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the
academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web
as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests
or restrictions.

Even though Google’s program could make millions of books available
to hundreds of millions of Internet users for the first time, some
libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to
dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that
dominance for commercial gain.

“There are two opposed pathways being mapped out,” said Paul Duguid,
an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of
California, Berkeley. “One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other
by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.”

Last month, the Boston Library Consortium of 19 research and
academic libraries in New England that includes the University of
Connecticut and the University of Massachusetts, said it would work
with the Open Content Alliance to begin digitizing the books among the
libraries’ 34 million volumes whose copyright had expired.

“We understand the commercial value of what Google is doing, but we
want to be able to distribute materials in a way where everyone
benefits from it,” said Bernard A. Margolis, president of the Boston
Public Library, which has in its collection roughly 3,700 volumes from
the personal library of John Adams.

Mr. Margolis said his library had spoken with both Google and
Microsoft, and had not shut the door entirely on the idea of working
with them. And several libraries are working with both Google and the
Open Content Alliance.

Adam Smith, project management director of Google Book Search, noted
that the company’s deals with libraries were not exclusive. “We’re
excited that the O.C.A. has signed more libraries, and we hope they
sign many more,” Mr. Smith said.

“The powerful motivation is that we’re bringing more offline
information online,” he said. “As a commercial company, we have the
resources to do this, and we’re doing it in a way that benefits users,
publishers, authors and libraries. And it benefits us because we
provide an improved user experience, which then means users will come
back to Google.”

The Library of Congress has a pilot program with Google to digitize
some books. But in January, it announced a project with a more
inclusive approach. With $2 million from the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, the library’s first mass digitization effort will make
136,000 books accessible to any search engine through the Open Content
Alliance. The library declined to comment on its future digitization
plans.

The Open Content Alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the
founder and director of the Internet Archive, which was created in 1996
with the aim of preserving copies of Web sites and other material. The
group includes more than 80 libraries and research institutions,
including the Smithsonian Institution.

Although Google is making public-domain books readily available to
individuals who wish to download them, Mr. Kahle and others worry about
the possible implications of having one company store and distribute so
much public-domain content.

“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one
corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have
handed too much control to a private entity,” Mr. Kahle said.

The Open Content Alliance, he said, “is fundamentally different,
coming from a community project to build joint collections that can be
used by everyone in different ways.”

Mr. Kahle’s group focuses on out-of-copyright books, mostly those
published in 1922 or earlier. Google scans copyrighted works as well,
but it does not allow users to read the full text of those books
online, and it allows publishers to opt out of the program.

Microsoft joined the Open Content Alliance at its start in 2005, as
did Yahoo, which also has a book search project. Google also spoke with
Mr. Kahle about joining the group, but they did not reach an agreement.

A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a
book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines
other than Microsoft’s.

“Unlike Google, there are no restrictions on the distribution of
these copies for academic purposes across institutions,” said Jay
Girotto, group program manager for Live Book Search from Microsoft.
Institutions working with Microsoft, he said, include the University of
California and the New York Public Library.

Some in the research field view the issue as a matter of principle.

Doron Weber, a program director at the Sloan Foundation, which has
made several grants to libraries for digital conversion of books, said
that several institutions approached by Google have spoken to his
organization about their reservations. “Many are hedging their bets,”
he said, “taking Google money for now while realizing this is, at best,
a short-term bridge to a truly open universal library of the future.”

The University of Michigan, a Google partner since 2004, does not
seem to share this view. “We have not felt particularly restricted by
our agreement with Google,” said Jack Bernard, a lawyer at the
university.

The University of California, which started scanning books with the
Open Content Alliance, Microsoft and Yahoo in 2005, has added Google.
Robin Chandler, director of data acquisitions at the University of
California’s digital library project, said working with everyone helps
increase the volume of the scanning.

Some have found Google to be inflexible in its terms. Tom Garnett,
director of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a group of 10 prominent
natural history and botanical libraries that have agreed to digitize
their collections, said he had had discussions with various people at
both Google and Microsoft.

“Google had a very restrictive agreement, and in all our discussions
they were unwilling to yield,” he said. Among the terms was a
requirement that libraries put their own technology in place to block
commercial search services other than Google, he said.

Libraries that sign with the Open Content Alliance are obligated to
pay the cost of scanning the books. Several have received grants from
organizations like the Sloan Foundation.

The Boston Library Consortium’s project is self-funded, with
$845,000 for the next two years. The consortium pays 10 cents a page to
the Internet Archive, which has installed 10 scanners at the Boston
Public Library. Other members include the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Brown University.

The scans are stored at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and
are available through its Web site. Search companies including Google
are free to point users to the material.

On Wednesday the Internet Archive announced, together with the
Boston Public Library and the library of the Marine Biological
Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, that it would
start scanning out-of-print but in-copyright works to be distributed
through a digital interlibrary loan system.

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