What price liberty? You can have it for free, with strings attached, or you can have it for $30 per book. Google and Microsoft say they want to make all of the world's information available to all, and why should anyone care if they make a buck or three on every search?

The search giants have been taking slightly different tacks to making books searchable.
Google, the worldwide leader in search, is bull-rushing the issue, saying it will digitize every book ever written, regardless of whether or not it gets permission. It argues that merely digitizing the content doesn't violate anyone's copyright, and promises it will only display snippets of copyrighted text for fair use such as quotes used by scholars.

Microsoft is trying to be seen as more respectful of authors and other copyright holders, and has said it will only digitize books that are not protected by copyright, or books whose copyright holders have given Microsoft permission to do so.

Both companies said they will digitize the books at no cost to the libraries and publishers who hold them, but both companies also require exclusive search rights on the materials they so generously digitize.

That condition isn't particularly appealing to the publishing and academic community, who don't like the idea of any company putting any kind of restrictions on which search engine users must use to access this supposedly liberated information.

So it doesn't come as much of a surprise to see many libraries shunning deals with both companies, as the New York Times reported today.

The Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian are suspicious that the search engine companies are laying the groundwork for future restrictions on who can ultimately access the digitized copies of the books they copy.

Google and Microsoft will argue that the libraries are trying to keep information from the masses by forcing them to make the trek to Boston or Washington or wherever the books are being sequestered in ivory towers inaccessible to all but the privileged few.
But those populist arguments are specious at best and disingenuous at worst. If they really wanted to make the world's information available to all, the search companies wouldn't attach such thick and woolly strings.

They wouldn't like to admit it--maybe they really do think the Internet wouldn't exist without them--but there are alternatives.

Libraries have turned to the Open Content Alliance and the Internet Archive, which charges up to $30 for each book it digitizes. The Internet Archive says it is the largest publicly available Web archive in existence, containing 65 billion pages from 50 million Web sites worldwide, including texts, audio recordings, moving images and software as well as archived Web pages.

The Alliance just got a cash gift from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which I remember fondly for having subsidized my daughter's favorite TV show, "Arthur." Arthur's favorite pastime was, of course, reading.

I wonder if the Gates Foundation will contribute to the Alliance.