Scan This Book!

An excerpt from Scan This Book!, by Kevin Kelly, The New York Times:

"The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. [...] Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. [...]

I note that while the article mentions Google over fifty times, it goes to some pains to not mention any of the successful competition to the Google book scanning project, such that wanting to quote Brewster Kahle it becomes necessary to describe him as an archivist overseeing another scanning project rather than actually mention The Internet Archive that he founded, nor the Open Content Alliance (of which Google's competitor Yahoo is a primary contributor), nor Project Gutenberg (which has been around since 1971), nor, despite the obvious congruence of subject, Carnegie Mellon's Universal Library.

Google's motto may be "don't be evil" but I think it's important to remember that their scanning projects are hardly philanthropical; it's a necessary part of their business model to index all the world's knowledge so — like any good corporate citizen — they can better serve their shareholders by increasing ad revenues. Unlike public libraries, it's inimical to Google's business interest for projects like the Open Content Archive to succeed if they impact upon profits. Google is not open, nor should we expect them to be. They just happen to have a boatload of cash, unlike most libraries. Trying to figure out how to work with Google without selling their soul (or their holdings) to the non-evil empire is the razor's edge that libraries are now being asked to walk. Given that there are some good, viable alternatives, they can choose to walk on a different razor.