journal of digital research & publishing - The Sydney eScholarship ...

1 P M J O U R N A L O F D I G I T A L R ESEARCH & P UBLISHING
of Google Books. The digital divide provides a major challenge to any technology seeking
to equalise access to information and learning across the world, however the technology
itself is a helpful tool for those who can access it in a meaningful manner.
The Question of Representation
Of equal concern are the broader ethical questions arising from the primacy of Google
in our society’s information systems. Google is, despite its many branches across the
globe, essentially an American company, it has American values and, notably, the two
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American Publishers and the Authors Guild is also both American. Due to the Google
Books Settlement Agreement, only copyright laws in America have been dealt with, which
results in an uneven representation of texts. Where, therefore, does the literature of the
rest of the world stand in terms of representation in Google Books? As of 16/3/10, four
of the six books listed as ‘Interesting’ on Google Books Home are American, and none
are from continental Europe or Asia, little has changed since then, though the range is
updated with great frequency. The user must ask themselves if this bias is due only to
Google’s American origins, or a combination of its origins and the legalities surrounding
its project.
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details pertaining to each text, the user can either navigate through the page views
available to them or they can go to the ‘Overview’ page where full details can only be found
at the end, under the heading ‘More Book Information’, notably these details are missing
the copyright information found on the front page of the book itself. Google may not be
violating copyright, as it has made the Google Books Settlement Agreement, however the
traditional emphasis placed on the author and publication rights is greatly reduced. It
could be argued that while Google Books provides greater access to the text itself, the
author takes second place to the provider.
Google, through its remediation of online content (Bolter, Grusin, 2000), is the creator,
while authors write the works themselves; for the most part Google is the one who makes
those works into an accessible online form. This is a huge shift in roles for Google, who
assert that their main goal is perfecting the search function to ‘provide continuous
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experience for millions of people’ (Google 2010). Now, as a part of their mission statement,
Google wishes to increase the rate of digitisation of content (Google 2010), to allow for
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