Sergey Brin Sticks it to Google Settlement Critics

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has posted an op-ed editorial in the New York Times urging the book community not to lose what could well be a once-in-history opportunity to rescue the content of millions of book from obscurity.

"The vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries," he points out. "Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down."

Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

Brin recounts other tragic losses of historical and literary heritage including the library at Alexandria and, of more recent vintage, the United States Library of Congress.

Assuring us that us that "nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort," Brin reminds us that "Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks."

Brin concludes with the hope that destruction of significant libraries "never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world’s foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it’s an important step. Let’s not miss this opportunity."

Read Brin's editorial in full in A Library to Last Forever. E-Reads supports the settlement worked out in good faith by the author and publishing community seeking to protect our precious legacy of books. And we take a dim view of the motives of some who have criticized the settlement simply because they didn't think of it first and didn't bestir themselves to do anything about orphaned books until Google demonstrated there's money to be made in them. For more about that, you can click here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.