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In a famous episode of the television show, The Twilight Zone, Henry Bemis, “a bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by…a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of the clock,” miraculously survives a nuclear blast. The lone survivor, he despairs until he discovers that the entire book collection of the public library has been saved as well. Finally, the bibliophile can truly pursue his passion, uninterrupted by anything or anyone, with, as he declares “all the time I need, and all the time I want.” However, after arranging all of the books that he intends to read into perfectly ordered stacks, and situating himself on the steps of the library to begin his literary fete, his glasses slip from his nose and shatter on the stone. Within his grasp are all of the books that he could ever want to read, and yet, his access to them has been denied by a cruel quirk of fate. He can feel the texture of the books’ cover but cannot see what is inside of them. He knows they are there, but can never enter them, can never experience the magic of exploring their hidden worlds. With this terrible knowledge written large across his face, the camera zooms out, reducing Henry Bemis to just another heap on the library’s steps. The narrator delivers his inevitable verdict: “Mr. Henry Bemis [is] in the Twilight Zone.”

We are all in the Twilight Zone, we just haven’t realized it yet. Or so, essentially, writes Robert Darnton, Harvard University’s Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, in his recent article in The New York Review of Books, “Google and the Future of Books.” According to Darnton, we are all like Henry Bemis, except, rather than having our glasses accidentally break from a tumble, they have been filched by the soft, moisturized hands of Larry Page and Sergei Brin and then ruthlessly and systematically comminuted beneath their canvas Adidas. Darnton alleges that Google, though it has managed to digitize a staggering number of books over the past four years, making accessible to the users of the internet works previously languishing in the backrooms of University libraries, as the result of new plans in the wake of a recent copyright lawsuit, will now be the main obstacle to universal access of these materials. 

Darnton has a problem with the monetization of the library. In particular, he is deeply suspicious of Google’s potential monopoly of access to digital books.  The fact that Google is a publicly traded company and must answer to the powers of profit and not just the altruistic gods of knowledge or the reasonable voice of the people is a real sticking point for him.  That Google has no obligation (beyond its self-imposed promise “of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education”) to society at large—that its first allegiance is to its shareholders—is reason for alarm. As Darnton asserts,

Libraries exist to promote a public good: “the encouragement of learning,” learning “Free To All.” Businesses exist in order to make money for their shareholders—and a good thing, too, for the public good depends on a profitable economy. Yet if we permit the commercialization of the content of our libraries, there is no getting around a fundamental contradiction.

The class action suit leveled against Google in the fall of 2005 for its digitization of copyrighted texts ended in a settlement (pending a New York district court’s approval) that gives Google the digital copyright to all out-of-print books and to any copyrighted book whose author chooses to opt in. Because the suit was a class action, no potential competitor in the digital book trade can make headway in digitizing copyrighted book unless it goes to individual copyright holders one by one or is confronted with a class action suit of its own. So, to mount a real challenge to Google’s dominance would take an incredible amount of time, during which Google could easily move to head off its would-be rival. Furthermore, as Darnton points out, the revenue sharing agreement of the settlement (giving Google 37 percent of the profit and the holder of the copyright 63 percent) effectively allows Google to charge as high prices as it wishes with few checks and balances. Google will have no real competition and no real price ceiling, a combination rife with the potential for consumer exploitation.