What is the Google Book Search?
“Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime.” – Eric Schmidt, Google CEO
The original Google Print Library idea was to digitize and "google-ize" 18 million books. The idea being to preserve rare and obscure books and give the public access to them. This means that Google would scan in entire volumes of work and apply their search algorithms to the full text of the book. So you could type in a word or phrase and Google would search for every book that contained those words by scanning each line of text in every book in the data base. Essentially the project would create a digital card catalogue of all the world's books, and make them accessible to the public at large.
The Issues
Scholars and researchers have hailed the project for its unprecedented "democratization of information" while authors, publishers, photographers and artists, whose work appears in the books, derride it for trampling copyrights. Most people seem to believe that the project is a great idea and it provides an unprecedented amount of access to information that might otherwise be lost. Even many authors praise the concept as a public good, however, they take issue with the manner in which Google is develpoing their database. The main crux of the argument stems from a little clause in the U.S. Copyright Law that deals with the concept of fair use.
Also in question are Google's motives behind the project and the control of written works. The Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed a lawsuit in 2005 to stop Google from continuing the Book Search project, claiming fair use infringement. The two parties eventually reached a settlement in 2008, an updated version of that settlement is currently sitting before a federal judge in New York City for a review of the settlement's fairness. Included in the settlement are an "opt out" clause for any authors and publishers that do not want to be a part of the settlement, funding for an agency to reimburse authors for the use of their work, and a clause giving Google the rights to add any book printed after the year 1923 to their database unless an author or publisher has opted out of the agreement. This last statement raises many questions about the future of books and publishing. It gives Google a lot of power and control over the print industry, and many are skeptical about their motives, the most vocal of which is science fiction and fantasy author Ursula le Guin.