The company’s seemingly boundless expansiveness has been a matter of much discussion, particularly among management scholars and business reporters. The breadth of its influence and activity is often interpreted as evidence that it is an entirely new species of business, one that transcends and redefines all traditional categories. But while Google is an unusual company in many ways, its business strategy is not quite as mysterious as it seems. Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its main business: selling and distributing online ads. Rather, it stems from the vast number of “complements” to that business. Complements are, in economic terms, any products or services that tend be purchased or consumed together, such as hot dogs and mustard or lamps and lightbulbs. For Google, everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. As people spend more time and do more things online, they see more ads and they disclose more information about themselves—and Google rakes in more money. As additional products and services have come to be delivered digitally over computer networks—entertainment, news, software applications, financial transactions, phone calls—Google’s range of complements has extended into ever more industries.
Because the sales of complementary products rise in tandem, a company has a strong strategic interest in reducing the cost and expanding the availability of the complements to its main product. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that a company would like all complements to be given away. If hot dogs were free, mustard sales would skyrocket. It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than anything else, explains Google’s business strategy. Nearly everything the company does is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants information to be free because, as the cost of information falls, we all spend more time looking at computer screens and the company’s profits go up.
Most of Google’s services are not profitable in themselves. Industry analysts estimate, for example, that YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion in 2006, lost between $200 million and $500 million in 2009.27 But because popular services like YouTube enable Google to collect more information, to funnel more users toward its search engine, and to prevent would-be competitors from gaining footholds in its markets, the company is able to justify the cost of launching them. Google has let it be known that it won’t be satisfied until it stores “100% of user data.”28 Its expansionary zeal isn’t just about money, though. The steady colonization of additional types of content also furthers the company’s mission of making the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.” Its ideals and its business interests converge in one overarching goal: to digitize ever more types of information, move the information onto the Web, feed it into its database, run it through its classification and ranking algorithms, and dispense it in what it calls “snippets” to Web surfers, preferably with ads in tow. With each expansion of Google’s ambit, its Taylorist ethic gains a tighter hold on our intellectual lives.
THE MOST AMBITIOUS of Google’s initiatives—what Marissa Mayer calls its “moon shot”29 —is its effort to digitize all the books ever printed and make their text “discoverable and searchable online.”30 The program began in secret in 2002, when Larry Page set up a digital scanner in his office in the Googleplex and, to the beat of a metronome, spent a half hour methodically scanning the pages of a three-hundred-page book. He wanted to get a rough sense of how long it would take “to digitally scan every book in the world.” The next year, a Google employee was sent to Phoenix to buy a pile of old books at a charity sale. Once carted back to the Googleplex, the volumes became the test subjects in a series of experiments that led to the development of a new “high-speed” and “non-destructive” scanning technique. The ingenious system, which involves the use of stereoscopic infrared cameras, is able to automatically correct for the bowing of pages that occurs when a book is opened, eliminating any distortion of the text in the scanned image.31 At the same time, a team of Google software engineers was fine-tuning a sophisticated character recognition program able to handle “odd type sizes, unusual fonts or other unexpected peculiarities—in 430 different languages.” Another group of Google employees spread out to visit leading libraries and book publishers to gauge their interest in having Google digitize their books.32
In the fall of 2004, Page and Brin formally announced the Google Print program (it would later be renamed Google Book Search) at the Frankfurt Book Fair, an event that since Gutenberg’s day has been the publishing industry’s chief annual gathering. More than a dozen trade and academic presses signed on as Google’s partners, including such top names as Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, and the university presses of Oxford, Cambridge, and Princeton. Five of the world’s most prestigious libraries, including Harvard’s Widener, Oxford’s Bodleian, and the New York Public Library, also agreed to collaborate in the effort. They granted Google permission to begin scanning the contents of their stacks. By the end of the year, the company already had the text of an estimated hundred thousand books in its data bank.
Not everyone was happy with the library scanning project. Google was not just scanning old books that had fallen out of copyright protection. It was also scanning newer books that, while often out of print, were still the copyrighted property of their authors or publishers. Google made it clear that it had no intention of tracking down and securing the consent of the copyright holders in advance. Rather, it would proceed to scan all the books and include them in its database unless a copyright owner sent it a formal written request to exclude a particular book. On September 20, 2005, the Authors Guild, along with three prominent writers acting individually, sued Google, alleging that the scanning program entailed “massive copyright infringement.”33 A few weeks later, the Association of American Publishers filed another lawsuit against the company, demanding that it stop scanning the libraries’ collections. Google fired back, launching a public relations offensive to publicize the societal benefits of Google Book Search. In October, Eric Schmidt wrote an op-ed column for the Wall Street Journal that portrayed the book digitization effort in terms at once stirring and vainglorious: “Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World and Third, en toute langue—and all, of course, entirely for free.”34
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.”35
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.”36 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 comm
ercial 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?”37 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.”38
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.39 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.40 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.”41 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.”42 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.”43 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:
But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive,—the long shriek, harsh above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village,—men of business,—in short, of all unquietness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace.44
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.”45 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 th
e 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.
The Shallows Page 18
