The Google Book Settlement and Works in Manuscript

The Google Book Settlement has this in common with literary works: that every time I look at it, something fresh strikes me. But in the case of the settlement agreement it's usually another trap waiting for someone.

With all we have heard about it so far, we have yet to hear anything about Google's designs on manuscript archives. Yet the definition of 'book' laid down in the opening section of the settlement agreement has been carefully drawn to include some manuscript materials:

"Book" means a written or printed work that (a) if a "United States work," as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101, has been registered with the United States Copyright Office as of the Notice Commencement Date, (b) on or before the Notice Commencement Date, was published or distributed to the public or made available for public access as a set of written or printed sheets of paper bound together in hard copy form under the authorization of the work’s U.S. copyright owner, and (c) as of the Notice Commencement Date, is subject to a Copyright Interest. [My emphasis.] Section 1.16

A lot of authors and literary estates have deposited their archives with university libraries in the US: this includes a large number of authors from the UK. It is, to say the least of it, unlikely that they envisaged the prospect of Google's scanning their rough drafts and putting them online. I wonder how many authors and literary executors in this position have yet realised that they need to develop a policy on what they will allow Google to digitise, display and sell?

The definition in the settlement agreement continues: 'The term “Book” does not include … personal papers (e.g., unpublished diaries or bundles of notes or letters)'. But that still leaves a lot else that authors and their families might prefer to keep for the eyes of trained researchers, who will quote a few plums, with permission, in academic publications or biographies, and play nice with the copyright holders in order to obtain that permission, and perhaps some privileged access.

There is something intellectually incoherent about planning to digitise parts of any manuscript archive on the basis of whether the pages are 'bound together' or not.

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My post on opting out (24 August) was briefly glimpsed in the Google Blog Search index earlier today. But now it has vanished again.

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In a different part of the wood, I had a very pleasurable moment earlier today, when I found a nice old copy of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures made in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BCE, on my favourite local market bookstall for just £7.50. Three fat volumes, published in 1848 by Oxford University Press: nice clear print, and fully interleaved with blank pages for notes. Some long-dead Victorian theology student has very thoroughly annotated the first 25 chapters of Genesis: and no more.

I have always fancied a Septuagint, but this is the first secondhand copy I have ever seen. Last time I looked up the price of a new copy, it was over £50: more than I could justify for something that I cannot tell myself is an essential research source.

Just out of interest, I looked up the Septuagint on Google Book Search. There are several early nineteenth-century editions, but it takes more careful scanning than Google cares to pay for to digitise Greek text in a form that may be read with comfort. In each of the ones I looked at, the text was blurred, sometimes quite badly blurred.