Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it's Google. If Google was, in truth, motivated by the highest ideals of service to the public, then it should have declared the project a non-profit from the beginning, thereby extinguishing any fears that the company wanted to somehow make a profit from other people’s work. There are plenty of ways to attribute blame in this situation. But that agreement then came under further attacks from a whole new set of critics, including the author Ursula Le Guin, who called it a “deal with the devil.” Others argued that the settlement could create a monopoly in online, out-of-print books. In the settlement agreement, they also put terminals in libraries, but didn’t ever get around to doing that. Nonetheless, by 2008, representatives of authors, publishers, and Google did manage to reach a settlement to make the full library available to the public, for pay, and to institutions. Two years of insults, ill will, and litigation ensued. That approach didn’t go over well with authors and publishers, who sued for copyright infringement. The problems began with a classic culture clash when, in 2002, Google began just scanning books, either hoping that the idealism of the project would win everyone over or following the mantra that it is always easier to get forgiveness than permission. And yet the attainment of that goal has been stymied, despite Google having at its disposal an unusual combination of technological means, the agreement of many authors and publishers, and enough money to compensate just about everyone who needs it. In other words, it would be the world’s first online library worthy of that name. The thrilling thing about Google Books, it seemed to me, was not just the opportunity to read a line here or there it was the possibility of exploring the full text of millions of out-of-print books and periodicals that had no real commercial value but nonetheless represented a treasure trove for the public. Searches of out-of-print books often yield mere snippets of the text-there is no way to gain access to the whole book. But while the corpus is impressive, most of it remains inaccessible. On one hand, Google has scanned an impressive thirty million volumes, putting it in a league with the world’s larger libraries (the library of Congress has around thirty-seven million books). Today, the project sits in a kind of limbo. “It’s mind-boggling to me, how close it is.” “We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,” Marissa Mayer, who was then a vice-president at Google, said to this magazine in 2007, when Google Books was in its beta stage. It was the most ambitious library project of our time-a plan to scan all of the world’s books and make them available to the public online.
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