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.