About a year ago, the Association of American Publishers decided that they wanted to take Google Inc. to court for copyright infringement illustrated by the Google Print project. Google intended to digitize thousands of books through means of scanning and be able to search for books through the Google Print page. Google Print’s access to books for the scanning was to be provided by major institutions, University of Michigan, Stanford University, Oxford University, Harvard University, and the New York Public libraries. This effort was hindered by the lawsuit.

Knowing that this battle against publishers would be difficult to fight alone, Google requested for reinforcements through means of subpoena from rivals Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft Corporation, and Amazon.com, Inc.. These listed companies are to provide documents that enable Google to defend itself from the copyright lawsuits.

Notably, the same publishers that are mad at Google for their book scanning initiative favor a different effort revolving around the Open Content Alliance (OCA) created by Yahoo! and supported by notable players including Microsoft. This effort also revolves around the scanning of books as well, but it is unclear as to whether the OCA would monetize around this service. However, it is quite clear that Google’s intentions is to sell ads similar to the topics discussed in the scanned books deposited into the Print project.

The Open Content Alliance has a solid number of participants and was created “as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture [source].” The Bay Area newspaper, Mercury News reported that the founder of Internet Archive (also a participant of the OCA), Brewster Kahle expressed concerns of Google’s book scanning initiative. Kahle was quoted as asking “Is the library of the future going to be open? Or will it be controlled by a couple of big corporate players?”

Amit’s Thoughts:
To help formulate an opinion of my own on Google Print, I discussed the matter with my friend, Mo Kakwan. Primarily we focused on Brewster’s above quote about how the “library of the future” will be “controlled.” The outcome of the discussion was that we agreed that Google was simply making information from books a lot more accessible.

“Now I don’t have to drive to the library to try and compete to check out a book with all the other kids in my class” stated Kakwan. “We can all access the information at the same time.”

Mo also mentioned that at many universities, some students would rip pages out of books so that other competing students would not be able to access the same information. Because of Google and the OCA’s efforts, these ripped pages can now be found again online.