Google’s “Digital Card Catalog”

Google has resumed digitizing books for its Google Print project, according to the official Google Blog. The effort was stopped for a period of time after an outcry by authors and publishers, including a lawsuit from the Authors Guild.

Google intends to focus first on content less likely to spark copyright controversy, including public domain and out-of-print books.

The best part of Google’s effort to mollify copyright holders is dubbing the effort a “digital card catalog” - a brilliant public relations move. “Digitizing entire books” sounds scary enough to send even forward-thinking authors and publishers to their attorneys. Creating a “digital card catalog” sounds far less threatening, and even helpful.

I’ve spoken to many published writers, and with the exception of a few top-tier, brand name authors, all felt their book or books hadn’t received enough exposure or marketing support. Google is likely to win over the vast majority of these authors by making their work more accessible. It may take longer to get John Grisham and Stephen King on board, but Google is off to a good start.

Digitization of books will clearly happen - the only fuss will be over the details of how to define “fair use” in a digital world. The bigger question is where Google is going with this effort. I speculated about their potential as a publisher; Roy Schestowitz opines that perhaps Google print is the base for a massive machine learning/AI project.

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