Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web
Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.
Context & Ripple Effects
The book-scanning race has been running for two years against a backdrop of contested opinion: commentators argued in 2005 that critics should not fear Google's library ambitions, while authors who initially sided with Google in its publishing-industry scrap gave the company early cover. What was framed then as an abstract copyright fight is now surfacing as a concrete bargaining problem between libraries and the two companies doing the scanning.
The resistance is not new, only sharper: a February 2006 report already warned that libraries feared a digital lockdown if commercial partners controlled access to scanned collections. Today's news is that several major research libraries have acted on that fear, turning down offers from both Google and Microsoft rather than accept restrictions on how their digitized books can be used.
First-order effects
- Google and Microsoft each lose access to major research collections they had hoped to scan, shrinking the corpus their book-search products can draw on relative to what these libraries hold.
- The refusing libraries retain full control over their digital collections, keeping open the option of non-restrictive or shared digitization arrangements instead.
Second-order effects
- Both companies face pressure to soften the access restrictions that killed these deals, since the same objections will recur with every future library prospect — the rejected terms become a published negotiating baseline.
- Other research libraries gain leverage in their own negotiations, able to point to peers that walked away rather than accept restrictive terms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large-scale digitization shifts from a corporate giveaway toward negotiated control of scholarly collections, with libraries acting as gatekeepers over who may scan and under what access rules.
- The standoff pushes the industry toward a structural question that neither company's current offer answers: whether the digitized record of major research libraries ends up inside proprietary search databases or under institutional and open-access governance.
The trend: Library digitization is moving from a land-grab that companies could win with scale alone to a seller's market in which research libraries set the terms of access to their collections.