Regarding the news, I should say that the New Yorker article on Google's book-scanning project is not particularly good. In cynical hands, it could be read as an extended ad for the company, with lots of direct quotes from Google's PR people, and uncritically presented CEO spin such as this:

"'We've had this fortunate streak that when we've done things that have impacted our users and society as a whole—positively, in a significant way—we've been rewarded by that downstream in some way.'"

That's glossing the success of Google text ads, if you didn't read the article. And of all Google's accomplishments, I'm not sure text ads are the one that has most "positively impacted society as a whole."

Then, is it possible that Toobin didn't know that Amazon's doing the same thing, and did it first? He mentions competitors, like the "Open Content Alliance," but not Amazon. I'm sure the bias wasn't deliberate.

Indeed, let's assume it's not a 5-page textual Google ad. I can also forgive the blatant typo on page 31 (never caught one of these before), also a PR quote, where a stray numeral "8" has wandered in. (An OCR or a speech-recognition glitch?) And it's easy to stifle the titter when Toobin says that the book-search feature is "up and running in a beta (or testing) version" (Guess he didn't get the Web 2.0 memo).

A deeper flaw is that it sheds no light on the legal or technological implications of the idea. I'm still in the dark as to why this isn't plainly illegal. I've heard that "fair use" allows copying 10% of a work, but mousing about, it seems a good deal more is being copied. In my experience, Amazon's "Look Inside the Book" shows three out of every four pages (for Anne Carson's "Plainwater" it let me read the first 24 pages straight). For some reason, the article doesn't convey how much of a book is displayed in Google book search. Surely Google has exact figures; I know Amazon does. Toobin misleads us when he says they only put "snippets" of books on the site, saying "Google searches turn up only the search term and about twenty words on either side of it." That's true for ordinary web search, but the book search features give several pages running before missing out a few. To a layman, it seems obvious this is more than your average "fair use" snippet.

The only counterargument is, again, company spin: "Google asserts that its use of the copyrighted books is 'transformative,'" [excuse me, is it leveraging any synergies by the by?] "That its database turns a book into essentially a new product." This is explained at some length, then a law professor is quoted as saying, vageuly, that the project does not necessarily fall under fair use. Toobin is a law journalist; why doesn't he press this issue?

I'd be curious to know the legal implications if a site were to reveal a different subset of pages to different people at different times, thus potentially leaking the whole book, though not to any individual user. Won't there be sites that capture and archive sets of book pages captured from Google, Amazon and the rest—pages contributed by users—thus building up an alternative free library? (Bookipedia, anyone?)

How about technical and design issues? The article mentions the interesting idea that those "elegant algorithms" of Google's, the ones we're always hearing about (grumbles about that persistent phrase are relegated to a future post), will be ineffective for book search, sine books don't have (at least not so manifestly) the interlinked quality of web pages. But this is dropped as "a huge research area."

The only sharp point in the article is this one: "The most striking thing about Pajama Day at Google was how few people participated. Most of the rank and file saw the stunt for the manufactured fun that it was." Unmasking the enforced-fun culture of the present corporate moment (O let's have it on a bit—late internetism?) is a worthy goal, but Toobin sets out for something else—forecasting the law of a future era of ubiquitous digitized books—and gets lost, unable to apply much significant journalism to the task.