The Next Great Library

Google’s announcement Tuesday that it will spend about $150 million scanning books from leading university libraries into its search engine will bring some serious weight to the scattered grab bag of the Internet.

Earlier this week, the Library of Congress and libraries in Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced they would have 70,000 scholarly books available online by next April and hundreds of thousands more by the decade’s end. So Google is not alone, but its well-financed effort dwarfs the public one.

At this point, print publishers are ferociously protecting copyrighted work. However, if Google’s offerings of books in the public domain catch on and attract online advertising, that tune could change. Even now, commercial publishers would be wise to soften their opposition to putting longish excerpts from their copyrighted books on the Web.

Some critics have groused that a user typing in the words “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” might see paid messages from entrepreneurs selling everything from mattresses to sleeping pills before landing on the Bard’s text. A few seconds of distraction seems a reasonable payment for a wealth of searchable literature.

Google’s motivations may not be entirely high-minded, but whose have been? King Ptolemy of Egypt, for instance, said he created the great library at Alexandria in the 3rd century BC as a “comprehensive organ of all knowledge.” But the library was also a key bit of empire-building that prompted Alexander the Great to nominate him as his successor.

Whatever Google’s motives, its new project is likely to spread information in ways that Ptolemy could never have dreamed of.