Google books

According to a NY Times article only days old the US Supreme Court will not hear an appeal from publishing houses and authors who accused Google books of massive copyright infringement. This legal battle has taken more than a decade to finally be decided. The court decided to leave in place a lower court decision saying the Google books project was ‘fair use’ of copyrighted books. I count myself as a sympathizer to Google’s goal of digitizing every book in the world to make them searchable. On my earlier blog post about the digital divide I spoke of the world’s population getting increasing access to the internet but not the academic journal articles. Before Google books this would also be true of books since much of the world does not have access to great libraries such as those in Western metropolitan areas. If Google were to have been successfully challenged, this digital divide would have continued to grow even larger. Under the fair use policy Google is only showing previews of books under copyright but they are providing humanity with the great service of offering options where the book is accessible nearby, such as a library. A great study by Helen Georgas for Libraries and the Academy Portal studied researching among undergraduate students and summed up her findings as follows:

“Students used both Google and a federated search (resource discovery) tool to find material they believed to be relevant. Each source was evaluated for topic relevance, authority, appropriateness, and date, and assigned a total quality score. Results showed that the books found via Google were slightly higher quality than those uncovered via the federated search tool. The articles and additional sources students found via the federated search tool were slightly to moderately higher quality, respectively, than those discovered via Google.”

It is great that students and learners across the world will increasingly be able to see the combined published work of the world but I hope that Google will start to make inroads on the academic journal articles as well. Without Google books, only those learners paying tuition or paying some other way will be able to see the best journal articles and it can be easily argued that the whole scholarly community would benefit if more people could build on others’ work and progress humanity faster.