If you love books and care about the knowledge they contain, there is a problem that needs to be solved. Somewhere in the region of 175m books exist in the world today. A tiny fraction of those are in print and for sale in bookshops or on the web. Another small portion are so old that they are out of copyright and anyone can use them.
But the remainder of the world's books – indeed the majority – are out of print but in copyright. They are hard for people to find unless they know exactly what they are looking for, and it's very difficult for copyright holders to exploit them commercially. Although copies may be available in libraries, they are effectively dead to the wider world.
Imagine if it were possible to bring those books back to life, to enable people who might be interested in the knowledge they hold to find them, buy them and read them. This is what the Google Book Search Settlement seeks to achieve. It's not just our vision, it's one we share with authors and publishers groups.
Google's founders recognised the problem back when Google was just a start-up in the late 1990s. They proposed a project to digitise all the world's books, but at that time the idea seemed so far-fetched they couldn't persuade anyone in the company to work on it. It took a further five years before Google Books was born. Today, users can access information contained in more than 10m books.
Like many things that have not been tried before, the project has proven to be very controversial. In 2005, Google was sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Since then we have worked closely with those groups to reach a settlement aimed at a shared goal – to unlock the wealth of information held in out-of-print books and to fairly compensate those who hold the rights to the works involved. We believe that the settlement is a good one, not only for authors and publishers but also for readers.
Yet doubts remain, and there is particular concern among authors that they are in danger of handing control of their work to Google. Let me address that concern and dispel some of the myths.
The settlement aims to make access to millions of books available either for a fee or for free, supported by advertisements, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders. A new not-for-profit registry will be created to identify the rights holders of lost books and to collect and distribute revenues.
And the rights holders will remain in control. The reality is that they can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether.
Some have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, suggesting it will limit consumer choice and hand Google a monopoly. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other organisation from pursuing its own digitisation efforts. We wish there were a hundred such services. But despite a number of important projects to date – and Google has helped fund some of them – none has been on the same scale simply because no one else has yet chosen to invest the time and resources required. But if there are to be a hundred services in future, we have to start with one.
If we successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path. The road towards the digitisation of the world's books has so far been anything but smooth and there are, no doubt, further obstacles ahead. In Europe there will need to be new arrangements involving authors and publishers, as the current settlement will benefit only readers in the United States. We believe that it is a journey well worth undertaking.
The truth is that readers around the world who seek the information locked in millions of out-of-print books currently have little choice other than to travel to a small number of libraries in the hope of finding what they are looking for. And if you're an author, you have no way to make money from your work if it's out of print.
Imagine if that information could be made available to everyone, everywhere, at the click of a mouse. Imagine if long-forgotten books could be enjoyed again and could earn new revenues for their authors. Without a settlement it can't happen.