Anxiety about Google's library-digitization project has ranged from concern that it will rob authors of income to concern it will turn libraries into a capitalist enterprise. The U.S. Copyright Office fears that the settlement "alters the property interests of millions of rights-holders of out-of-print works without any Congressional oversight, and has the capacity to create diplomatic stress for the United States." Geoffrey Nunberg, in his recent essay ("Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars,"The Chronicle Review,online edition, August 31), has suggested that Google's hasty, and monopolistic, digitization of books will yield a faulty catalog.
These fears must not bury an important breakthrough in offering old and rare books in an increasing number of languages and alphabets to those who cannot easily view them. The Copyright Office must take a stronger leadership role in making literary and scholarly work more, rather than less, visible in a virtual marketplace dominated by advertisements and instant publication. And the academic community must seek ways of helping Google to address our needs without undermining its efforts to adapt time-honored texts to a digital era.
For those who, like me, measure rooms in square feet of not floor space but wall space, Google Books helps to navigate an existing library. My own buying habits have increased with the online visibility of books' content. Since Google's Library Project was initiated in 2004, I have spent full evenings browsing new releases without leaving my living room. Intrigued by a new title? Left a book in my office and need a page number? Choosing what to assign next quarter? Check Google Books. Occasionally I find myself searching for an elusive page in a book that is sitting next to me.Published books are all too often eclipsed by unmediated, ephemeral, online literature; this is, unfortunately, apparent in the college literature classes I teach. Enabling Google's access to published material (and yes, in all editions) will ensure the relevance of the libraries of the past to the libraries of the future. Library digitization promotes intellectual engagement, even on a topic, or in a language, enjoyed by a minority. Just as I am able to browse early editions of 19th-century Russian literature, future readers may view my work long after its expected print life.
Like all teachers, I am wary of the dangers of misinformation, plagiarism, and perpetual distraction—dangers that the digital age did not invent, but that it hasn't eliminated either. In what some might call a reactionary gesture, I ban laptops in my classroom and require students to bring hard copies of their books to class and take notes by hand. The goal is to demonstrate the beauty of discussing literature across a table, of corresponding with writers of the past in the margins of their books while thinking slower than one can click.The libraries that have joined forces with Google have had the foresight to use paperless technology to reinforce a long literary tradition. Not only have they opened their holdings to a readership that could not otherwise reach them, they are stocking the world's virtual bookshelves with time-tested sources. When students leave my classroom, restart their computers, and curiously type a word into a search engine, they will retrieve not only encyclopedic definitions of dubious origin, but volumes that have been written and carefully edited since Gutenberg's remarkable 15th-century invention.Virtual media represents a new intervention, which brings with it new anxieties about the spread of text. But digital libraries spread texts worth reading.
