Let The Digitizing Begin

It is now official - Google has begun to digitize the classics for your downloading pleasure.

After a great deal of fuss and lawsuits over Google's plan to scan everything, including that which is still protected by copyright, the search engine behemoth has focused on the classics, that which is far too old to cause the author any alarm, as the author is most certainly dead.

The question is, is this good or bad? The publishing houses and book shops might be alarmed, but then again, is there much of a market for Dickens and Thackeray any more, outside of the school room? Obscure poetry, long forgotten novels, all that sort of thing will be available through Google's Book Search feature. Students could print out their own copy of Shakespeare's works, bypassing the publisher. Would this loss of business have any sort of effect on the bottom line?

Reg Carr of Oxford University believes that Google is performing a most valuable deed, opening up the books that sit in research libraries, well out of reach of the interested parties that populate the globe. Now the researcher can sit in the comfort of their home, study what is held in major university collections, and not have to come up with the costs of travel and lodging to do a bit of reading. The benefits to the research community are enormous.

Part of Google's overall scheme is to provide information on copyrighted texts, letting the searcher know where the item could be found. It has all the makings of a vast on-line card catalogue. Anyone who has run across an obscure reference and then tried to locate the original text can appreciate the convenience of a Google search.

For the reading public, the Google Book Search can be the answer to any late-night craving for something to read. There are innumerable classics that will be available, from Dante's Inferno to Les Miserables, ready to be downloaded to your personal computer. Then again, the idea of having a sheaf of papers, rather than a bound book, does not sound quite so appealing. Why, you could pretend you were a literary agent, with that unbound full manuscript, pages tumbling out and falling to the floor, out of order. You could create a whole stack of the things and really play-act the agent game.

'Alas, Mr. Balzac, I fear I must pass. Not quite right for my list.' 'Regretfully, Mr. Dickens, my list is full. The fiction market is so tight and I must fall in love with a manuscript...' Unless, of course, you are a university student - don't try that on your professors. Not much of a sense of humor, those humanities types.