Google Books: Concerns on a Monopoly
14 years ago Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, wrote the article “A Book Grab by Google” on the impending monopoly Google Books could have on the digitization of books as publishers and authors battled over the rights Google had over the use of materials for digitization. With a tool for searching becoming a bookstore, Google’s project of scanning digitized materials en masse would create a situation where they could take unclaimed materials as their own, creating a situation where, as the article puts “Google will have permission to bring under its sole control information that has been accessible through public institutions for centuries.”
While that settlement did not go through, the risk of a monopoly still hangs around to this day. Just in the past year, publishers have been going after The Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to digitizing and preserving information on the internet, for copyright infringement in the ways they lend digital copies as shown in “Online-Books Lawsuit Tests the Limits of Libraries” by Erin Mulvaney and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg. If the Internet Archive is taken down, that means there is one less competitor for Google Books in digitized reading material. There are many potential risks to this, with one example provided below.
One of the sources that Google Books and other digitizers take from is the British Library. In fact, many of the time Google Books will be the one digitizing with other services like HathiTrust and the Internet Archive taking from their collection. (Riddell, Bassett) However, is what is being digitized an accurate and unbiased representation of the library’s collection? The article “What Library Digitization Leaves Out: Predicting the Availability of Digital Surrogates of English Novels.” by Allen Riddell, and Troy J. Bassett shows that digital surrogates of books shows a bias towards mutli-volume formats and male authors, with “Single-volume novels, novels by women, and novels by authors of unknown gender less likely have digital surrogates.” (Riddell, Bassett) This bias creates a gap to access information, highlighting the dangers of having few competitors in the world of digitization.
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