The Shallows (20 page)

The suits proceeded. After three years of negotiations, during which Google scanned some seven million additional books, six million of which were still under copyright, the parties reached a settlement. Under the terms of the accord, announced in October 2008, Google agreed to pay $125 million to compensate the owners of the copyrights in the works that it had already scanned. It also agreed to set up a payment system that would give authors and publishers a cut of advertising and other revenues earned from the Google Book Search service in the years ahead. In return for the concessions, the authors and publishers gave Google their okay to proceed with its plan to digitize all the world’s books. The company would also be “authorized to, in the United States, sell subscriptions to [an] Institutional Subscription Database, sell individual Books, place advertisements on Online Book Pages, and make other commercial uses of Books.”
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The proposed settlement set off another, even fiercer controversy. The terms appeared to give Google a monopoly over the digital versions of millions of so-called orphan books—those whose copyright owners are unknown or can’t be found. Many libraries and schools feared that, without competition, Google would be able to raise the subscription fees for its book database as high as it liked. The American Library Association, in a court filing, warned that the company might “set the price of the subscription at a profit-maximizing point beyond the reach of many libraries.”
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The U.S. Justice Department and Copyright Office both criticized the deal, contending it would give Google too much power over the future market for digital books.

Other critics had a related but more general worry: that commercial control over the distribution of digital information would inevitably lead to restrictions on the flow of knowledge. They were suspicious of Google’s motives, despite its altruistic rhetoric. “When businesses like Google look at libraries, they do not merely see temples of learning,” wrote Robert Darnton, who, in addition to teaching at Harvard, oversees its library system. “They see potential assets or what they call ‘content,’ ready to be mined.” Although Google “has pursued a laudable goal” in “promoting access to information,” conceded Darnton, granting a profit-making enterprise a monopoly “not of railroads or steel but of access to information” would entail too great a risk. “What will happen if its current leaders sell the company or retire?” he asked. “What will happen if Google favors profitability over access?”
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By the end of 2009, the original agreement had been abandoned, and Google and the other parties were trying to win support for a slightly less sweeping alternative.

The debate over Google Book Search is illuminating for several reasons. It reveals how far we still have to go to adapt the spirit and letter of copyright law, particularly its fair-use provisions, to the digital age. (The fact that some of the publishing firms that were parties to the lawsuit against Google are also partners in Google Book Search testifies to the murkiness of the current situation.) It also tells us much about Google’s high-flown ideals and the high-handed methods it sometimes uses to pursue them. One observer, the lawyer and technology writer Richard Koman, argued that Google “has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society.”
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Most important of all, the controversy makes clear that the world’s books
will
be digitized—and that the effort is likely to proceed quickly. The argument about Google Book Search has nothing to do with the wisdom of scanning printed books into a database; it has to do with the control and commercialization of that database. Whether or not Google ends up being the sole proprietor of what Darnton calls “the largest library in the world,” that library is going to be constructed; and its digital volumes, fed through the Net into every library on earth, will in time supplant many of the physical books that have long been stored on shelves.
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The practical benefits of making books “discoverable and searchable online” are so great that it’s hard to imagine anyone opposing the effort. The digitization of old books, as well as ancient scrolls and other documents, is already opening exciting new avenues for research into the past. Some foresee “a second Renaissance” of historical discovery.
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As Darnton says, “Digitize we must.”

But the inevitability of turning the pages of books into online images should not prevent us from considering the side effects. To make a book discoverable and searchable online is also to dismember it. The cohesion of its text, the linearity of its argument or narrative as it flows through scores of pages, is sacrificed. What that ancient Roman craftsman wove together when he created the first codex is unstitched. The quiet that was “part of the meaning” of the codex is sacrificed as well. Surrounding every page or snippet of text on Google Book Search is a welter of links, tools, tabs, and ads, each eagerly angling for a share of the reader’s fragmented attention.

For Google, with its faith in efficiency as the ultimate good and its attendant desire “to get users in and out really quickly,” the unbinding of the book entails no loss, only gain. Google Book Search manager Adam Mathes grants that “books often live a vibrant life offline,” but he says that they’ll be able to “live an even more exciting life online.”
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What does it mean for a book to lead a more exciting life? Searchability is only the beginning. Google wants us, it says, to be able to “slice and dice” the contents of the digitized books we discover, to do all the “linking, sharing, and aggregating” that are routine with Web content but that “you can’t easily do with physical books.” The company has already introduced a cut-and-paste tool that “lets you easily clip and publish passages from public domain books on your blog or website.”
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It has also launched a service it calls Popular Passages, which highlights brief excerpts from books that have been quoted frequently, and for some volumes it has begun displaying “word clouds” that allow a reader to, as the company says, “explore a book in 10 seconds.”
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It would be silly to complain about such tools. They
are
useful. But they also make clear that, for Google, the real value of a book is not as a self-contained literary work but as another pile of data to be mined. The great library that Google is rushing to create shouldn’t be confused with the libraries we’ve known up until now. It’s not a library of books. It’s a library of snippets.

The irony in Google’s effort to bring greater efficiency to reading is that it undermines the very different kind of efficiency that the technology of the book brought to reading—and to our minds—in the first place. By freeing us from the struggle of decoding text, the form that writing came to take on a page of parchment or paper enabled us to become deep readers, to turn our attention, and our brain power, to the interpretation of meaning. With writing on the screen, we’re still able to decode text quickly—we read, if anything, faster than ever—but we’re no longer guided toward a deep, personally constructed understanding of the text’s connotations. Instead, we’re hurried off toward another bit of related information, and then another, and another. The strip-mining of “relevant content” replaces the slow excavation of meaning.

IT WAS A
warm summer morning in Concord, Massachusetts. The year was 1844. An aspiring novelist named Nathaniel Hawthorne was sitting in a small clearing in the woods, a particularly peaceful spot known around town as Sleepy Hollow. Deep in concentration, he was attending to every passing impression, turning himself into what Emerson, the leader of Concord’s Transcendentalist movement, had eight years earlier termed a “transparent eyeball.” Hawthorne saw, as he would record in his notebook later that day, how “sunshine glimmers through shadow, and shadow effaces sunshine, imaging that pleasant mood of mind where gayety and pensiveness intermingle.” He felt a slight breeze, “the gentlest sigh imaginable, yet with a spiritual potency, insomuch that it seems to penetrate, with its mild, ethereal coolness, through the outward clay, and breathe upon the spirit itself, which shivers with gentle delight.” He smelled on the breeze a hint of “the fragrance of the white pines.” He heard “the striking of the village clock” and “at a distance mowers whetting their scythes,” though “these sounds of labor, when at a proper remoteness, do but increase the quiet of one who lies at his ease, all in a mist of his own musings.”

Abruptly, his reverie was broken:

Leo Marx opens
The Machine in the Garden
, his classic 1964 study of technology’s influence on American culture, with a recounting of Hawthorne’s morning in Sleepy Hollow. The writer’s real subject, Marx argues, is “the landscape of the psyche” and in particular “the contrast between two conditions of consciousness.” The quiet clearing in the woods provides the solitary thinker with “a singular insulation from disturbance,” a protected space for reflection. The clamorous arrival of the train, with its load of “busy men,” brings “the psychic dissonance associated with the onset of industrialism.”
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The contemplative mind is overwhelmed by the noisy world’s mechanical busyness.

The stress that Google and other Internet companies place on the efficiency of information exchange as the key to intellectual progress is nothing new. It’s been, at least since the start of the Industrial Revolution, a common theme in the history of the mind. It provides a strong and continuing counterpoint to the very different view, promulgated by the American Transcendentalists as well as the earlier English Romantics, that true enlightenment comes only through contemplation and introspection. The tension between the two perspectives is one manifestation of the broader conflict between, in Marx’s terms, “the machine” and “the garden”—the industrial ideal and the pastoral ideal—that has played such an important role in shaping modern society.

When carried into the realm of the intellect, the industrial ideal of efficiency poses, as Hawthorne understood, a potentially mortal threat to the pastoral ideal of meditative thought. That doesn’t mean that promoting the rapid discovery and retrieval of information is bad. It’s not. The development of a well-rounded mind requires both an ability to find and quickly parse a wide range of information and a capacity for open-ended reflection. There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden. We need to work in Google’s “world of numbers,” but we also need to be able to retreat to Sleepy Hollow. The problem today is that we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual locomotion.

Even as Gutenberg’s press was making the literary mind the general mind, it was setting in motion the process that now threatens to render the literary mind obsolete. When books and periodicals began to flood the marketplace, people for the first time felt overwhelmed by information. Robert Burton, in his 1628 masterwork
An Anatomy of Melancholy
, described the “vast chaos and confusion of books” that confronted the seventeenth-century reader: “We are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.” A few years earlier, in 1600, another English writer, Barnaby Rich, had complained, “One of the great diseases of this age is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world.”
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Ever since, we have been seeking, with mounting urgency, new ways to bring order to the confusion of information we face every day. For centuries, the methods of personal information management tended to be simple, manual, and idiosyncratic—filing and shelving routines, alphabetization, annotation, notes and lists, catalogues and concordances, rules of thumb. There were also the more elaborate, but still largely manual, institutional mechanisms for sorting and storing information found in libraries, universities, and commercial and governmental bureaucracies. During the twentieth century, as the information flood swelled and data-processing technologies advanced, the methods and tools for both personal and institutional information management became more elaborate, more systematic, and increasingly automated. We began to look to the very machines that exacerbated information overload for ways to alleviate the problem.

Vannevar Bush sounded the keynote for our modern approach to managing information in his much-discussed article “As We May Think,” which appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1945. Bush, an electrical engineer who had served as Franklin Roosevelt’s science adviser during World War II, worried that progress was being held back by scientists’ inability to keep abreast of information relevant to their work. The publication of new material, he wrote, “has been extended far beyond our present ability to make use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”