Not so long ago Google signed a deal to end a law­suit launched against them by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The Google Book pro­gram has been scan­ning books from a few major libraries since 2005–University of Michigan was one of the first–and making the text search­able online, and dis­playing snip­pets of them in the search dia­logue. There was an assump­tion that Google would make money from this process, either by posting their ubiq­ui­tous text ads on the inter­face, or just by the inex­orable process of making the internet more useful and thus bringing more folks into Google’s path, or some­thing. The Authors orga­ni­za­tions were con­vinced, rea­son­ably, that Google must have seen a way to make money from it, or they wouldn’t be doing it. And they fig­ured that since it’s their job to rep­re­sent authors, and the product of authors was making money somehow, they wanted a taste. When Google pointed out that making book dis­covery easier might just be the single biggest thing that anyone could do to drive up declining book sales and make back-catalogs prof­itable, they didn’t care or weren’t con­vinced. They wanted money up front, directly, from Google.

So they opened up a public rela­tions front, and opened up a law­suit alleging infringement.

In the mean­time, some other folks got con­cerned that Google was the only entity scan­ning books. They fig­ured book dis­covery was indeed an impor­tant public good, and one that prob­ably shouldn’t be the domain of a single for-profit. Google wasn’t talking about giving away their data­bases, and in fact seemed to be re-negotiating the terms of their agree­ments with the con­tributing libraries such that access to the data was becoming increas­ingly cen­tral­ized. So the non-profit Open Content Alliance (with cash and tech from Microsoft and Yahoo, among others) fired up their scan­ners, with the intent of cre­ating a com­monly avail­able pool of data on what was in all those books that are sit­ting on all those shelves.

I give huge props to Google for starting the book scan­ning move­ment. Before them, nobody thought it could be done tech­ni­cally, and nobody much seemed to realize that it should be done. In the time since, librar­ians at par­tic­i­pating uni­ver­si­ties say they’ve seen an enor­mous uptick in book check-outs. It’s a great pro­gram, broadly speaking.

But the data shouldn’t only belong to Google. If the libraries had been col­lec­tively smart, once the Open Content Alliance came along offering to scan the books into a shared data­base they should have switched exclu­sively over to them, and sug­gested that Google join to the alliance too. If the author’s asso­ci­a­tions were smart, they should have sup­ported the ini­tia­tive whole-heartedly, made what-can-you-do ges­tures when the data­bases were leaked and started showing up on Kindles (or alter­na­tively, struck a deal with Amazon), and watched the roy­al­ties on sale of phys­ical copies of their back-catalogs skyrocket.

Some libraries did indeed join the OCA, for example University of California and U of Toronto. But the Author’s associations–as con­tent trade groups tend to be–were stupid with greed. How stupid? In order to settle the deal, Google made them an offer: give us a license to scan the works of all the authors you rep­re­sent, and we’ll give you some money. But only us! And the author’s asso­ci­a­tion said, hey, money! That doesn’t seem like a good deal for the authors to me: book read­er­ship has been declining, and get­ting a few cheques cut from Google HQ isn’t going to change that, but making books rel­e­vant and dis­cov­er­able cer­tainly can. Centralizing that capacity in a single search-provider won’t facil­i­tate rel­e­vancy and dis­cov­er­ability. And regard­less of the finan­cial ben­efit or loss to authors, it cer­tainly seems like a bad thing for human knowledge.

And that looked to be that. Yet another cen­tral­iza­tion of a sig­nif­i­cant public good into that one single mono­lithic infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture cor­po­ra­tion, Google. Aided once again by Google’s vision, their engi­neering prowess and their strategic astute­ness (I like the term “deep clev­er­ness”). You have to hand it to Google, they are bril­liant at what they do. The thing is, you might want it back some day. Google should flourish on their ability to com­pete in tech­nology and busi­ness, not on their ability to end com­pe­ti­tion. So that deal made me very sad.

Which is why today is a happy day:

Justice Dept. Opens Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Books Deal — MIGUEL HELFT, New York Times (Registration required.)

“The Justice Department has begun an inquiry into the antitrust impli­ca­tions of Google’s set­tle­ment with authors and pub­lishers over its Google Book Search ser­vice, two people briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have been in con­ver­sa­tions in recent weeks with var­ious groups opposed to the set­tle­ment, including the Internet Archive and Consumer Watchdog. More recently, Justice Department lawyers noti­fied the par­ties to the set­tle­ment, including Google, and rep­re­sen­ta­tives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, that they were looking into var­ious antitrust issues related to the far-reaching agreement.”

Also some reporting from the Wall Street Journal here, but it’ll cost ya.

My guess is that the search term “google antitrust” is going to get pop­ular over the coming years. Google is like a gov­ern­ment: they’re only as good as we make them. As far as books, per­son­ally, I’d rather have the Open Book Alliance, and if this inves­ti­ga­tion is a move towards breaking the weird little col­lu­sion between Google and the author’s asso­ci­a­tions, maybe open scan­ning and search­a­bility of books still has a chance.