He's Right!

I have a been a big believer in Google and Google's indexing of the world's libraries, but this guy is right! The universities and libraries of the world should be the ones digitizing and making available to the public through an open source way their vast collection of books, Google can then index that. But one company shouldn't be controlling it! This vast digital library should be freely available to all companies, institutions and and individuals equally.

However, I should say that Google is not the one at fault here, in fact I think they are very much in the right, instead it is the universities and libraries of the world that are at fault, why haven't they modernized fully? Why is that to have access to a truly good library I have to live in a large city like New York or something like that? Just because I live in the other 99% of the United States somehow means that I shouldn't have access to the huge sum of human knowledge contained in books? I say no and I think, on principle, the larger Universities do as well. Look at Berkeley, they are putting whole semesters worth of classes online, available for anyone to view, that's what they, and all other large libraries, should be doing with their libraries.

To ramble on a bit more about this too, I think that it's not all the Library's fault either, really. They have to deal with the problems of copyright law in today's environment, which is more and more hostile towards free flow of information. Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong proponent of copyright law but really, what's the difference between me happening to live in, say, Chicago, and having access to a huge library of books and being able to access those same books online, but now I can do it in the middle of Oklahoma. Obviously the first hurdle is copyright law but there also is the hurdle of costs. Libraries have no incentive to put books online when their costs are paid for by local taxes, they actually have a disincentive.

So, here I propose a compromise, as I stand on my soap box yelling at a wall, the Libraries of the United States at least, should 1. Digitize all their books. 2. This digitization should be a federally funded project. 3. If the costs rise too high, which I seriously doubt would happen, then a small fee should be charged users of said library.

Google vs. Microsoft: Do you want Google to be your ‘librarian’?</a> by ZDNet's Donna Bogatin -- "Even before we started Google, we dreamed of making the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly organize searchable online," said Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of Products, in announcing Google’s aim to digitally scan libraries’ book holdings two years ago. In "Google Library’ to world: give us ‘all books in all languages,’ free of charge,” [...]