On the whole I am not an addictive type, but I must admit to a weakness for libraries. My unconscious mind, lethargic about many things, is always primed with pretexts for a visit to the Bodleian, or a great overseas library, or some quirky special collection. It can always conjure up an urgent need to look at a book that has probably not been opened for 200 years, or to see what some classic text looked like before modern editors took it into their heads to modernise its spelling and punctuation, and perhaps its meaning too. I know that my library habit is unlikely to add more than a particle to the total store of human knowledge, but that takes nothing away from my delight in capturing some fugitive fact, correcting someone's misquotation, or lighting upon a marginal scrawl that has been transformed, by the passage of time, from an act of literary vandalism into a poignant message from a reader now lost to the world.
The smell of old bindings and the sound and texture of dry paper can of course enhance the pleasures of a session in a library, but after browsing in the lush digital pastures of Early American Newspapers, Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Early English Books Online over the past year, I am learning to get by without them. As well as giving me instant access to high-resolution images of every single page of thousands of rare old books and papers, these virtual libraries allow me to conduct instantaneous electronic searches covering every word within them. If you have never read books online before, or if your experience is confined to those endless scrolls of questionable text in plain typefaces provided by worthy old enterprises like Project Gutenberg, you will be in for a very pleasant surprise: the advantages of an exact photographic image are seamlessly combined with those of computer-searchable text, and the results will take your breath away.
The only snag is that libraries are not open all the time, and one of the many terrors that weekends and public holidays hold for me is the spectre of extended closures of the reading rooms. This past Christmas, however, I managed to dispel the gloom using nothing but my clunky old home computer. I was vaguely aware that Google had floated the idea of a virtual library that would be free to all users, and when I woke up one morning with an itch to inspect the first edition (1807) of William Hazlitt's book on Malthus, I decided to give it a try. On opening Google's home page I was at first disappointed: above the familiar gateway to the web I found the customary links to Google Images, Groups, News and Froogle, and it was only when I peeked under the tab called "More" that I found my way to something called Google Book Search, which took me to a new search page. I typed in "Hazlitt, Malthus," clicked on "Full view books," and in no time I was availing myself of images of all 378 pages of a copy belonging to New York Public Library, and, what's more, when I decided to ferret out Hazlitt's references to Edmund Burke, the search box took me to them straight away.
And that's only the beginning. Google Book Search will do for its virtual library exactly what the Google search engine does for the world wide web: you can type in your search terms, click on "All books," and in less than a second it will run through every page in its collection and provide you with a list of all the matches it can find. So when I repeated my "Hazlitt, Malthus" search, I was rewarded with more than 600 mentions in other books, most of them pertinent. I then succumbed to a standing temptation and searched for my own name, with the usual dispiriting results. By way of compensation I typed in my dad's name, and was astonished by the information—unrecorded in any other database known to me—that back in 1940, in the month he married my mother, he had an article published in Cyril Connolly's Horizon.
Like much of the material included in Google Book Search, Horizon is still covered by copyright. In accordance with its interpretation of the law on "fair use," Google will supply you with tantalising images of the lines containing your search terms, or perhaps even a whole page, together with links to booksellers and libraries that may be able to satisfy your new-minted desire for the thing itself; but it will not, as a rule, allow you to click through to the complete text. So I had to button up my curiosity, but as soon as the reading rooms reopened I was reaching for a bound volume of Horizon, and reading for the first time some words written by my father as a passionate young man.
Thank God for Google, I said to myself. But I nearly choked on the words: in the company I keep, praising Google would be on a par with shopping at Tesco, eating in McDonald's or speaking up for the political astuteness of George W Bush. Had I forgotten that Google is only the latest manifestation of American avarice, grown fat on the proceeds of advertising and now bent on world domination? It may pretend to be different, and its founders—Sergey Brin and Larry Page—may not be as other capitalists are. But they have certainly got very rich in quick time.
It is only ten years since Brin and Page were students at Stanford University, exploring techniques for ranking the results of computerised searches to ensure that those most likely to be significant would appear at the top of the list. Their basic idea, much refined in the course of development, was to prioritise pages that are popular in the sense of being frequently linked to, so as to generate something like an automated hit parade. This procedure, according to Brin and Page, is incorruptibly democratic: unlike, say, bestseller charts or public lending right figures, it is immune to manipulation either by enterprising private punters or by big powers or big money. And when the youthful entrepreneurs harnessed their formula to thousands of web-trawling computers and started selling advertising space, they had an unbeatable business plan coupled with a utopian mission statement: they would get rich, they proclaimed, by "organising the world's information and making it universally accessible."
Google now has almost 10,000 employees, mostly in California, and they all seem to be incandescent with self-belief, revelling in their periods of creative downtime and their informal corporate motto, "Don't be evil." But in the past year, their zeal has taken some hits. The immaculate Brin-Page algorithm was dented when BMW was caught gerrymandering to make its products jump to the top of the list when people searched for "used cars." And Google's commitment to "universal accessibility" lost some of its shine when it accepted state restrictions on the results it would offer to Googlers in the People's Republic of China.
Google Book Search is unlikely to run into such difficulties, if only because it operates with the solid medium of the printed word rather than the fleeting spectres that inhabit the web. But the project is still very young. It was conceived in 2002, when Larry Page rode to the rescue of the University of Michigan as it struggled to implement a decision to digitise its library of 7m books. At the rate it was going, the task was going to drag on till the turn of the next millennium, but Page was able to propose a new scanning technique which, as well as coping with weird typographies and operating across 430 languages, would get the whole job done in six years. What's more, he offered to carry out the work entirely at Google's expense. In 2004, Google clinched a similar deal with Oxford University, promising to scan a million books for them within three years, and a further 10m in the following decade; Stanford, Harvard and New York Public Library have now signed up to similar agreements.
The birth of Google Book Search was officially announced at the end of 2004, and a rudimentary version went online the following May. But it is still in its earliest infancy: some of the scans are imperfect, and anyway the first milestone of 15m digitised books will not be reached until 2010. Meanwhile, those publishers and authors who were at first affronted by Google's bullish plan to digitise publications still under copyright seem to be changing their minds. They are beginning to realise that, leaving aside the occasional blockbuster, the main problem in selling books is that most of the people who might be interested in buying a particular title have no idea that it exists, and Google Book Search will go a long way towards removing that obstacle without costing them a penny. Provided Google keeps within the law, either by paying for significant copyright material or by blocking access to it, it will be a help rather than a hindrance to writers, the publishing industry and print culture as a whole. "Our goal is to improve access to books," as Google says in one of its ingenuous press releases, "not to replace them." And the president of the University of Michigan has returned its generosity by praising Google Book Search as an "ethical and noble endeavour."
The locus of opposition has now moved to France, where a furious assault on Google Book Search has been launched by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, President of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Jeanneney has a long record as a servant of the French state—chief executive of Radio-France, head of the Commission for the Bicentennial of the Revolution, and junior minister for foreign trade—but he also holds intellectual culture in high esteem, especially if it is French. Culture, he avers in a new book, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge (University of Chicago Press), is a sanctuary of wisdom, knowledge and refinement, but it is also a delicate creature that needs the apparatus of the state to protect it from the hordes of philistines, anarchists and free-marketeers who see cultural works as "commodities" rather than sacred objects. Google, as far as Jeanneney is concerned, is the latest manifestation of the threat, and the most sinister the world has ever seen. Until now, knowledge has been in the care of otherworldly scholars who would not hazard a tentative conclusion until they had worked their way through dozens of authoritative books, carefully selected for them by wise librarians attuned to the rhythms of the mind rather than the market. Googlers, on the other hand, will let their American search engine do their thinking for them; they will concern themselves "with keywords and with individual pages, not with works considered as wholes," and they will treat the first return from their browser as if it were all they needed to know.
If Google Book Search is not halted in its tracks, Jeanneney warns, intellectual life as the French have always known it is doomed. French lawyers will abandon their law libraries, and allow Google to bamboozle them with formulations taken not from the European legal tradition but from Anglo-Saxon common law. And French historians investigating their own revolutionary tradition will be infected by a "hostile, popularised ideology" after the manner of Simon Schama, in which the "dazzling intuitions" that inspired the storming of the Bastille are eclipsed by the "crudest clichés" about the Terror.
Jeanneney's prognostications may turn out to be true, but if they do the blame will surely lie not with the rise of Google Book Search, but with a decline in legal and historical education. Researchers always need to be reminded not to put too much trust in the materials that happen to lie within easy reach, but the risk of distortion will be much greater if they confine their investigations to a shelf of pre-selected books in a library rather than exposing themselves to the awe-inspiring quantities of treasure mixed with dross that Google spreads before them. And if Google leads them away from carefully cultivated canons to wild texts that have not had a reader for centuries, the chances are that their critical wits will be whetted more effectively than if they had allowed themselves to be guided at every step by a solicitous librarian. Google may be creating new problems for scholars, but it offers new solutions too, and no one can play around with Book Search for more than a few minutes without stumbling into intellectual conflict zones that will wake them from the dogmatic doze that might have overwhelmed them in a well-regulated library.
But these anxieties about the future of libraries are aspects of a larger fear: fear of Anglo-American capitalism on the one hand and the all-conquering English language on the other. Oxford University's capitulation to Google is, as Jeanneney sees it, a return to the Churchillian habit of preferring the comforts of "old Anglo-Saxon solidarity" to the duties of "European patriotism." Oxford has turned its back on "centuries of intellectual wisdom" in order to embrace "a spontaneous prioritising of things that fit in to the American vision of the world." It has fallen in with the fetishism of the market that has blighted the English-speaking peoples ever since Adam Smith laid down its governing principles: that the pursuit of "short-term profit" can be counted on to create "the best of all possible worlds," while public goods like culture and education can be left to look after themselves. But this is an unhappy example. If Jeanneney had followed his own advice and taken care to read the "whole book," he would have known that Smith was in favour of government intervention in culture and education. He will find what he needs if he goes to Google Book Search and looks for The Wealth of Nations under "Full view books"; or, if he is in a hurry, he could do an "All Books" search for "Adam Smith public goods," which will supply him with a thousand salutary correctives in half a second. Even those with a taste for Jeanneney's kind of rhetoric may fear that he will give anti-Americanism a bad name.
Jeanneney's favoured method for keeping Google at bay is to build a European digital library modelled on the "Gallica" service provided by the Bibliothèque Nationale. Anyone who has used Gallica will be bemused by this suggestion: the site contains some attractive colour images but fewer than 90,000 books, often incomplete and in ugly hand-keyed transcripts, rather than the millions of photographic facsimiles already supplied by Google and the new generation of digital collections. Moreover, the whole enterprise is dedicated to the celebration of "a certain idea of France"—France as an immaculate national entity half as old as time, the fatherland of culture and freedom. Not France, you might say, so much as Francitania.
Jeanneney's dream is that Gallica could be expanded to provide a virtual resource dedicated to the "great founding texts of our civilisation" together with "major writings that have contributed to the rise of democracy, to human rights and to the recent unification of the continent." The contents would be selected and arranged not by impersonal computer algorithms but through the "collective reasoning" of France's finest librarians. Some of the costs could be covered by patriotic "book lovers" sponsoring the digitisation of their favourite titles, and the remainder might be paid for by the French government and the EU. The proposal has received the blessing of Jacques Chirac, who has also sought support from various European countries (excluding, of course, Britain and Ireland).
Google Book Search prides itself on offering access to vast quantities of books, but, Jeanneney says, "that philosophy is not ours." The president of the Bibliothèque Nationale is interested in controlled quality rather than unregulated quantity. But perhaps he ought to think again. Masterpieces are not the only books: mediocrities can have their value too, and when it comes to literary archives, quantity matters, and the classics can take care of themselves. If a library is destroyed, we do not weep for the canonical texts, which will be available by the barrowload elsewhere, but for the unknown documents that, however eccentric or truckle-headed or mendacious, might have yielded brilliant illumination if the right reader read them. Good librarians have always cared about quantity, and if Jeanneney and his colleagues are giving up on this tradition, it is just as well that Google is prepared to take it over. I hope Google Book Search will continue to grow, and I look forward to the day when it will offer me access to the holdings of the Bibliothèque Nationale as well. In the meantime, however, I shall keep taking my trips to the library.
