ZapTown

I thought after last week’s column about Annie Dillard, I’d tackle another female writer whose work I really appreciate, Ursula K. LeGuin. I’d started the column, and was more or less at the stage where all I had was ‘LeGuin is good, read her books’ when the giant ‘Amazonfail’ controversy engulfed the internet. It was sort of fascinating watching the internet rise up convulsively against Amazon, who’s been a center of the web as long as it’s existed. I scrapped my idea about LeGuin and started to do actual research, thinking I could write a column on the Amazon scandal and why moving books off of rankings was actually a big deal (I’m not that web-savvy, and it wasn’t clear to me, at first, exactly why people were upset).

And then, a day or two later, right after the holdiay weekend, Amazon issued a statement attributing the whole thing to a mistake. Well, there went my column idea.

Luckily, I have a new hot topic to touch on, and I’m pretty sure this won’t be resolved in the day or two before my column goes up. Specifically, I’m thinking of the Google Books project. Google Books. Hold that thought, because I’m going to go on a tangent for a paragraph or two.

I got a new bookshelf, a couple of weeks ago. I set it up in my front hall, where I have a little bit of space because of the way the wall bends. It’s a nice fit, and a good sized bookcase, too. I was able to unpack about a hundred books I’d had boxed up, because I didn’t have space for them, and fill the shelves with them. A bookcase looks sad when it’s empty, but when it’s full, it adds a whole new level of security to a home, I find. Some of the books were ones I hadn’t seen, or had out of the box in quite some time. I opened their covers, touched fraying spines, flipped them open to random pages, read favorite passages with a smile, and filed them on the shelves, to come back to as much or as little as I want to in the future. The reality of those books—their existence, the fact that I’ve purchased them, they sit in my home, makes my life a little richer, makes my house a little cozier. I look at that bookshelf, and I can see all the different thoughts, the ideas and storys side by side, the beautiful and the profane. It’s a neat trick that bookshelves pull.

The Google Books project has been the focus of some controversy in the past, that led to Google paying out a large settlement, at the behest of the Author’s Guild. In essence, Google is moving to add a giant database of books to the information it manages (and in that sense, controls). The site can actually currently be seen on the web (it’s currently in the beta-testing phase) and uses a graphical interface to allow users to search books by genre, author, etc. When you click on a book, it opens a window showing you a selection of pages from the book, as well as a sidebar giving links to purchase the book, and other information about the text, interspersed with the typical google text-based ads.

For example, I clicked on the book ‘The Finest Christmas Tree’ by John Hassett, and got a look at 8 of the book’s total 32 pages. For the complete story, I would presumably have to buy a book, but I could see enough to get the gist of the text—opening and flipping through it, if you will, and make an informed decision about the book. Works in the public domain are available for (watermarked) purchase and downloading, apparently. Not everybody thinks this is a good idea—specifically, google’s practice of freely scanning any book (at the rate of 1,000 pages an hour, apparently!) unless they’re told otherwise by rights holders drew fire leading to a $125 million dollar settlement.

Given Google’s comprehensive saturation of our society, it’s probable that the Google Books project is going to continue to grow and steamroller the opposing voices (the 125 million was to be divided up between ALL the authors affected. That ain’t much), and this database is likely going to be the way a lot of people in the future skim and select their books. If something’s out of print, or in the public domain, you won’t even need an actual copy of the book. You can just download it from google and read it on your computer. I haven’t even had my new little bookshelf a month yet, and it’s already an endangered species.