When Google Steamrolled The World of Books: The Dawn of a New World

Larry Page’s thinking on building a new digital world started while he was a PhD student at Stanford. For this, he dreamed that every single book could be available in a searchable form. And why can’t we digitise every single street in the world and forget about the feudal laws requiring local permissions?

And, so, as a leader in Google’s development, he was responsible for steamrolling over existing laws. Basically, Larry thought that the laws related to intellectual property were written at a time when people did not even know of a digital world. He thus wanted the world to have access to every piece of knowledge that had ever been created. Page was a person who proposed a solution to something but scaled the solution to a large multiple of a previous solution.

And so, Google created the Google Book Search/Google Print project and started to scan books from major libraries. But, book publishers kicked back against this and managed to get “Opt In, by default” ruling. This was a non-starter for Google, as it would have been almost impossible to contact every author whose work was in print and to find every follow-on copyright for those who had died. The EFF, too, railed back against the approach, defining that Google was opening up privacy issues and where they could discover exactly the paragraph of the book that they were reading. This is a little like a marketing company being able to link its advert to an actual payment.

At the time, others were looking to digitize our world, such as for Project Gutenberg — founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart — and the Internet Achieve. Microsoft, too, started to scan books and created Live Search Books in 2006. But the advances were just too slow for Google, and was not scaling as much as they desired.

Some, at the time, were saying, “Google was killing the access to books”, but the company felt that it had to happen. However, Google moved forward on the scanning of books and bypassed the “Opt-In” model. They were data-driven and did not quite understand why they would not be able to gather all the knowledge of humankind.

In 2013, Judge Denny Chin sided with Google in a court case between the Authors Guild and Google, which stated a fair use approach and that the scanning did not violate copyright law. Since then, Google has scanned over 25 million books. For this, they would be able to show snippers from books in search results. The service became Google Books and flipped the world of book publishing.

And, in four decades, we moved from the Industrial Age into the Information Age. This is the fastest transformation in the history of humankind. Perhaps we are now on Day 0 of building this world properly, and the advancements in AI have only been made possible through the ization that has happened over the past few decades.

Google is no longer a gutsy and small company that can steamroll things. It now must exist in the corporate world and is in danger of being investigated for anti-trust issues. Along with this, Google has never seen itself as a follower of anything, and has made its way leading on breaking through digital barriers.

For me, this the Dawn of a New World, it could be a scary world that is dominated by just a few powerful companies, or one that puts knowledge in the hands of every person on the planet and break down our privilege world of knowledge stores.