I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area of the United States. I spend a lot of time there with Jasmine, Australia's best-known speedsolver of the Rubik's Cube. Prior to the US, Jasmine and I were based in London, UK. We have also lived previously in the United States and Australia.

I have worked for an Australian business rules and compliance company since 1999 in Australia, the US and the UK. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.

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Google and the Death of the Book

The online Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting article on the topic "A new chapter in the death of the book," by Peter Martin.

The article describes efforts by various companies -- Google, Microsoft, Amazon -- to digitise and catalogue the contents of books. The idea is that traditional book catalogues are very limited in their ability to direct readers to content within a book because they only refer the author, title and a limited number of subjective classifications. Allowing searches of the entire contents of a book would make it much easier to find content in books.

In a lot of ways, this is a good idea. When I was at university, I studied a lot of history and a lot of law. Legal research was relatively easy because of the array of commercial research tools from vendors like LexisNexis and Thomson which indexed legal material from cases to articles. Historical research was much more complicated as there was no commercial demand for serious indexing. I regularly used to grab a pile of about 35 library books and load them into a car so I could sift through them at home. Basically, the Google idea is to make books more accessible and useful by allowing us to search them as we search the web.

The problem is that the publishing industry is up in arms about the threat it sees to its copyright. Microsoft and Amazon have been sensitive to this, by only scanning books that are out of copyright or for which they have obtained permission. The Google approach is different -- it plans to scan everything:

Right now in the Oxford University Library, the New York Public Library and the libraries of three US universities, staff are busy removing books from the shelves row by row and loading them onto trolleys for delivery to special centres where their entire contents are scanned and loaded into a computer.

Unfortunately for Google, it is less than clear that current copyright law will support what it is doing.

Google's efforts have raised one of those interesting conundrums we find when digital technology challenges our way of thinking about intellectual property. According to the Herald article:

If Google loses, those of us who love looking up books will lose. But I would also suggest that books themselves will lose. If books can't be searched when other sources of information can, over time books will become less important. They'll stay unsearched on library shelves and in the back of lounge room bookcases.

It will be interesting to see how this issue plays itself out.