(2017-04-11) Rosenberg How Google Book Search Got Lost

Scott Rosenberg on How Google Book Search Got Lost. “You have thousands of years of human knowledge, and probably the highest-quality knowledge is captured in books,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin told The New Yorker at the time. “So not having that — it’s just too big an omission.”

Two things happened to Google Books on the way from moonshot vision to mundane reality. Soon after launch, it quickly fell from the idealistic ether into a legal bog. 2017-04-20-SomersTorchingLibraryOfAlexandriaGoogleBookSearch

A decade-long legal battle followed — one that finally ended last year, when the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Authors Guild and definitively lifted the legal cloud that had so long hovered over Google’s book-related ambitions.

But in that time, another change had come over Google Books, one that’s not all that unusual for institutions and people who get caught up in decade-long legal battles: It lost its drive and ambition.

When I started work on this story, I feared at first that Books no longer existed

As a functioning and useful service, Google Books remained a going concern. But as a living project, with plans and announcements and institutional visibility, it seemed to have pulled a vanishing act. All of which felt weird, given the legal victory it had finally won.

When I talked to alumni of the project who’d left Google, several mentioned that they suspected the company had stopped scanning books. Eventually, I learned that there are, indeed, still some Googlers working on Book Search, and they’re still adding new books, though at a significantly slower pace than at the project’s peak around 2010–11.

Still, the bulk of the work at Google Books continues to be on “search quality”

To understand how Google Books arrived at this point, you need to know a few things about copyright law, which essentially divides books into three classes

Jaskiewicz does say that the scanning stations keep evolving, with new revisions rolling out every six months.

Some books are in the public domain

Plenty of more recent books are still in print and under copyright

Then there’s the third category: books that are out of print but still under copyright

turns out there are a whole lot of these — “between 17 percent and 25 percent of published works

considerably higher than Google Books’ current 25 million-plus

Once the settlement collapsed, Google went back to its scanning, and publishers pursued the burgeoning business of selling e-books, which had leapfrogged Google’s lead in the future-of-books race due to the success of Amazon’s Kindle. But the Authors Guild continued to press its lawsuit,

This was the proceeding that dragged on until the Supreme Court put it out of its misery last year — establishing once and for all that Google had a fair-use right to catalogue books and provide brief excerpts (“snippets”) in search results, just as it did with web pages.

The Authors Guild may have lost in court, but it believes the fight was worth it. Google “did it wrong from the beginning,” says James Gleick, president of the Guild’s board. Wow, sad to see Gleick on the stupendously-wrong side.

There are plenty of other explanations for the dampening of Google’s ardor: The bad taste left from the lawsuits. The rise of shiny and exciting new ventures with more immediate payoffs. And also: the dawning realization that Scanning All The Books, however useful, might not change the world in any fundamental way.

Once Google popularized the notion that Scanning All The Books was a feasible undertaking, others lined up to tackle it

In a sense each of these outfits is a competitor to Google Books. But in reality, Google is so far ahead that none of them is likely to catch up

Google took away a lesson that helped it immeasurably as it grew and gained power: Engineering is great, but it’s not the answer to all problems. Sometimes you have to play politics, too

Like many tech-friendly bibliophiles, Robin Sloan says he uses Google Books a lot, but is sad that it isn’t continuing to evolve and amaze us.

He also wonders: We know Google can’t legally make its millions of books available for anyone to read in full — but what if it made them available for machines to read?

Machine-learning tools that analyze texts in new ways are advancing quickly today.