I recently came across a bunch of articles on Google. Some of them are favorable, others are not. They’re all worth reading if you’re interested in Google, especially Google Books which is what most of the articles are about.
“The Search Party” by Ken Auletta – This article talks about Google’s lack of a presence in Washington DC until recently. What interested me most about this article is that it gives you insight into how they run their business. Particularly interesting to me was when it described one of the project meetings where proposals took place. In that meeting these quotes about a proposal stuck with me.
“We wanted something big. Instead, you proposed something small.” (From co-founder Larry Page)
“I’m just worried that we designed the wrong thing. And you’re telling me you’re not designing the optimum system. I think that’s a mistake…I’m trying to give you permission.” (From co-founder Sergey Brin)
“They [Brin & Page] think about what should be and they assume it is possible.” (From CEO Eric Schmidt)
What it sounded like to me was that they like to think big and pushing someone to achieve what may seem to be impossible. Instead of going for the quick and easy they want to do something big. That doesn’t work all the time, of course, but it’s something I just thought was interesting.
Google & Its Enemies by Jonathan V. Last – As the title might suggest this one is about Google and the problems it faces from organizations like the American Library Association, publishers & authors of books, the French, etc. You might be saying, “the French?” As this article says, the president of the national library in France (Jean-Noel Jeanneney) “principally attacked Google’s library project as a piece of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism” in his book “Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge.” Mostly it’s about the Google Books Search and the problems with it. Worth noting are the references to the New York Times v. Tasini case and Kelly v Arriba Soft. which are at least tangentally related to the Google Book Search.
Books @ Google by Jason Epstein – As the title of this article suggests, it is about Google Books. There’s a bit of history of the company in the article, but the following quote sums up the article pretty well.
“Page’s original conception for Google Book Search seems to have been that books, like the manuals he needed in high school, are data mines which users can search as they search the Web. But most books, unlike manuals, dictionaries, almanacs, cookbooks, scholarly journals, student trots, and so on, cannot be adequately represented by Googling such subjects as Achilles/wrath or Othello/jealousy or Ahab/whales. The Iliad, the plays of Shakespeare, Moby-Dick are themselves information to be read and pondered in their entirety.”
As I have said many other times before, reading a book online is next to impossible. Most people tend to print out an article longer than 20 pages (let alone 5 or 10.) Thus, while it is nice to think that Google Books has changed how we read books (though Steve Jobs says “people don’t read anymore.” until we get an ebook reader that is not cost prohibitive (as I believe Kindle is) and allows easy sharing of files, we will still have the hardcover books. And, as the quote above points out, it’s excellent that Google Books does find those snippets of text that can be useful, but it’s often the entirety of the text that we want, not just a snippit.
Google’s Moon Shot by Jeffrey Toobin – Toobin, whom some of you may know from his work that he does on CNN as legal analyst or from his well received book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court unsurprisingly writes about the legal ramifications of Google Books. He takes the title of the article from a quote he got from Marissa Mayer, one of Google’s VP’s and the person in charge of the books project. She said. “It’s mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot.” It’s worth your while to read the whole article because it does get into some really interesting legal predicaments. One interesting tidbit was Toobin’s estimation on how much this project is going to cost Google (not counting possible legal fees and/or settlements). He says it could cost $800 million. That’s a lot of money, if you ask me. But hey, Google bought YouTube (and all it’s legal problems) for $1.6 billion. Another interesting thing was what Lawrence Lessig said – if Google settles their lawsuits with the publishing industry and author’s guild, that “would be bad for everyone else” because it would “create a huge barrier for any new entrants into this field.” As Toobin succinctly summarizes, “a settlement could insulate Google from competitors, which would be especially troubling because the company has already proved that when it comes to searches it is not infallible.”
Hapless Seed by Michael Hirschorn – This article, like others, talks about Google Books but Hirschorn says that “while astonishing and ambitous and intuitively ingenious, [Google Books] is both a more promising and less earth-transforming prospect than either its detractors or its proponents think.” So, read on to see why Hirschorn thinks that way.
