The newspapers this week headlined a deal by which Google will gang with a gaggle of universities to digitize their library collections. According to the NYT (Dec 14), Google will ante up the money, about $10 each for 15 million books.

Google describes the project as:

Users searching with Google will see links in their search results page when there are books relevant to their query. Clicking on a title delivers a Google Print page where users can browse the full text of public domain works and brief excerpts and/or bibliographic data of copyrighted material. Library content will be displayed in keeping with copyright law. For more information and examples, please visit http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html.

Copyright will be observed. Google says:

We respect the rights of copyright holders and the tremendous creative effort of authors. Library books that are still in copyright will show up in search results, but users will only see bibliographic information and a few small text snippets until we get permission from publishers to show more.

According to the WSJ (Dec.14, 2004)(subscription required), publishers are likely to hop on board, seeing this as a way to sell backlist books, and impressed with favorable experiences with Amazon's search-inside-the-book.

Google may actually see this as a money-making opportunity, if it can sell advertising along with the links.

It is doubtful that Google will have the field to itself, though. Amazon already digitizes books, over 120,000 so far, and it is not likely to stand by. Nor will Microsoft and Yahoo be willing to cede the field to Google.

This possibility of competation raises an interesting issue. No publisher or library is likely to give exclusive rights over the books to Google. But who will own the digital image produced with Google cash? Will the library own it, and thus have the ability to re-share it with, say, Amazon? Or will Google own it, and thus be able to force Amazon, Microsoft, etc., each to pay for re-scanning the book?

That would be a sight -- a battery of scanning machines lined up in a row, with each book scanned multitudinous times. It sounds ridiculous, but, on the other hand, forced sharing doesn't work either, because then the first mover gets no reward for runnning the risk of total failure. (Viz., the telecom industry and UNE-P.)

It is indeed a conundrum, one of the many to be solved along the road to digital utopia.