Peter Griffin: Google book project a boon for publishers

It brings fantastic new services to market at lightning speed, but internet heavyweight Google has hit a snag in its most ambitious projection yet - one designed to make the text of the world's books searchable online.

Google Print could eventually make the text of millions of in-print and out-of-print books searchable via Google.com.

It's the modern-day equivalent of the ancient Library at Thebes, which housed the biggest collection of handwritten books and scrolls and books in the world before it burned to the ground.

Libraries participating in Google Print include Oxford University, Harvard University, the New York Public Library, Stanford University and the University of Michigan. Those institutions alone will keep Google scanning books for years.

Google Print appears to be the most ambitious online publishing effort since the formation of the Gutenberg Project (www.gutenberg.org), which has assembled a huge collection of out-of-copyright texts including the classics of William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Jules Verne.

If you want to cultivate your mind for free, download some literature from Gutenberg.

If Google and Gutenberg were to team up, that would be powerful enough, but being able to search extracts from copyrighted books has to be hugely valuable to anyone doing a bit of web-based research for pleasure or work.

Right now, Google's search engine will throw up references to books in response to your queries. But usually it will direct you to the homepages of the publishers or newspaper reviews of the books that you are directed through.

But with Google Print, publishers get a proportion of the "contextual advertising" revenue from the ads displayed on the Google pages the book references appear on. Google claims it will display three short excerpts from books in response to search engine queries and send the searcher to a website that tells them how to buy the book.

But Google Print has annoyed the Association of American Publishers, which has quite reasonably pointed out that in copyright law, so-called "express consent" is required before content can be reproduced.

Google will make multiple copies of the books and host them on servers all over the world so the content will load faster. But it won't ask permission first, expecting publishers to contact it if they don't want their books scanned. It claims it's making fair use of the content, but the publishing industry is wary of excerpts from its books being displayed without issuing its express permission first.

The fierce debate over that important point has forced Google to stop work on Google Print until November. It's a sort of ceasefire with the publishing industry.

The argument is similar to those that met anti-spam laws to make it illegal to flood internet users' inboxes with junk mail. Most spam laws, including the bill that was tabled before Parliament here last month, have an "opt-in" scheme where users have to agree to be sent mail before it can legally be sent to them. Opt-out schemes where internet users have to email advertisers to be taken off their mailing list are less favourable in the eyes of legislators.

In Google's case, an opt-in approach would appear to be the most sensible plan. But that would mean seeking the consent of the world's publishers, something that would surely be an administrative nightmare.

While the consent issue irks the publishing industry and may well lead to court action, the position of book authors is unclear.

In many cases, the rights to a book revert to the author once the book is out of copyright. Will those authors share in that ad revenue?

As the website Google Watch (www.google-watch.org) points out: "It is unclear whether the options under Google Print will include authors who are rights-holders. If it does, then the information required by Google from the rights-holder is intrusive and a violation of privacy. It will attach the author's Google cookie to the name, address and phone number of the author."

Google has opened a can of worms with Google Print, but I think it'll be able to get around the issues. It isn't, after all, like the music industry versus Napster battle of five years ago. That centred on the wholesale downloading of entire songs by internet users with no recompense to the publishers or artists.

This is more like the feature on many music download sites such as the new local service CokeTunes (www.cokefridge.co.nz), which lets you stream free a short sample of a song.

It will work because the precedent has already been set. For years, online book seller Amazon.com has been allowing browsers of its website to "search inside the book" they are interested in. The function generally gives you the first few scanned pages of the book, the dust cover blurbs and book cover.

I bought Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho after reading the first pages on Amazon.com. Hundreds of thousands of books are searchable at Amazon and also at A9.com, the Amazon search engine that accesses the same book samples.

I can see this happening with Google Print. It will be a boon for a publishing industry that faces the daunting task of trying to get its authors noticed in a crowded and competitive marketplace.