Google has started to invade the space of libraries, by making out-of-copyright books available to print, as well as to read online. This looks like one of those uses of technology from which no one benefits, except the manufacturers of printer ink. Google's great strength is not the way that it displays information, but that it allows you to find any in the first place.
Even if the only place you are searching is your own hard disk, Google's disk search is inferior to Yahoo's because it does not give such an informative display of the results. There are a number of other projects that have digitised a great many worthwhile books, among them Project Gutenberg and the Online Library of Liberty, a wonderful source for works of philosophy.
None the less, Google remains the most feared firm in the software business right now, so everyone assumes that it will stomp all over this market just as it has largely stomped its rivals in the search business. It may be that Google's digitisation project will turn out to be the one that gets the contents of most university English libraries online, but I think that this is actually one of the moments when we can see the future boundaries of Google's empire. In fact, it may well be that the company will be forced to retreat from these ambitions.
The first is that properly printed and bound books remain the best way to read continuous prose, and, very probably poetry. The books which are better on screen are those which are essentially databases - encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and other works of reference where the subject matter comes in discrete chunks which may be linked by references, and where there is no natural route from one end to the other. There are some books like this that are not dictionaries, and most of them are written and bought to be read on the lavatory.
Even with almost unimaginable improvements in screen technology, some printed books will always be more portable, more flexible, and easier to bash around. It's perfectly possible to print books on horrible paper with bad bindings and ugly print - this is what almost everything printed out from Google Books will look like - but only real publishers can produce something of the quality of Everyman hardbacks.
The second point is that books on screen, once they have been indexed and then reconstructed as disconnected snippets, lose context and with it some of their authority and some of the information that they carry. There is an enormous amount of information about the worth of a book which is carried "extratextually". Some of it, like the blurb, is misleading. But other things, like its mere presence in a good library, is itself a token of value.
Copyright libraries gain their unique value because they hold copies of everything ever published. But all other libraries, if they are well run, gain value from what they exclude as well. If there is a book there at all, it is because someone with good judgement thought it was important, and more worth buying than the alternatives.
But the really interesting question is what libraries have to offer that might be better value than free digital copies. However real the disadvantages of screens may be, it is fatuously optimistic to suppose that there will always be technological objections to reading books on screen. Sometimes the worse does drive out the better solution in the market. So it's worth asking whether libraries have social advantages over individual downloading: it's quite clear when you think about it that libraries offer the only way forward for the future of the book trade, and even of the music trade, since they are the only mechanism by which the producers can get paid a price which individual consumers think is fair.
There are only two ways really for writers to be paid. One is by the readers; the other is by people who want to buy readers' attention. We are used to the first way but there is nothing immutable or natural about it. It did not come into existence until centuries after Gutenberg, and it relies on all sorts of carefully balanced legal and social arrangements like copyright as much as on technology. It could perfectly well disappear again. Quite recently, Fay Weldon took sponsorship from a jeweller's chain to do product placement in one of her books. Hardbacks from before the first world war can have their endpapers full of advertisements and Google's entire business model is to replace funding from purchasers with funding from advertisers.
Good books have been produced under both systems, but more good ones, and perhaps absolutely better ones, have been produced when they were paid for because people wanted to read them. Google does not have to eliminate the market in printed books to make this impossible. It merely has to shrink it so much that the price of books goes right down again. If no one gets paid for writing books, fewer will be written, which may not be an unmixed catastrophe, but very much fewer really good ones will be written.
The only way out of this, it seems to me, is for libraries to pay for the right to distribute electronic texts. To some extent, this already happens. If you are a member of the Essex public library system, you have access to a very wide range of electronic reference works from any internet connected computer. These are far too expensive for an individual household - the OED, for instance, is £200 a year on an individual subscription and newspaper libraries are even worse. But library systems, by burying the cost in general taxation, can pay a fair price to the publishers, and deliver the results at a reasonable price to consumers. This has to be a better model than advertising.
