Seven Years of Google Books: The Next Chapter
Presenter: James Crawford, Engineering Director, Google Books

On Thursday morning, a crowd of forty, sprouting into about seventy as the aspirin and hangover cures kicked in, listened to a engineer with a Spartan mien. Like many crunchers from Mountain View, James Crawford had the warmth and physique of an Eames lounge chair. He liked to explain things. He was confident he knew all the answers. He did, after all, work at Google.

“Google’s mission was and continues to be to organize information and make it accessible,” said Crawford early in his run. There were many sentences phrased like that. Had I known Crawford was going to speak like this, I would never have imbibed so much gratis scotch the night before.

The sense I got was that Crawford had delivered this speech many times. He ran down the stats. More than 15 million books had been scanned. That’s over 5 billion pages and 2 trillion words in 478 languages (including three books in Klingon, 82 titles in Kalaallisut, and none in Kutenal), with the earliest going back to 1473. Library partners include Stanford and the University of Michigan.

“For a lot of these books, we can simply chop off the spine and scan the pages.” For a moment, I feared that Crawford was some digital Robespierre who had recently discovered the guillotine. But I was reassured when Crawford pointed out that Google was “required to scan nondestructively.” Thank goodness for libraries and their preservation policies. To accomplish this scanning, Google holds the books down with cradles. The images are then put “through fairly sophisticated series of image algorithms,” with the curve of the pages flattened through software. Every word on the page is indexed. There is also a system of ranking algorithms to ensure, for example, that the right Hamlet rises to the top.

Crawford pointed out a “cluster problem” with the metadata. If you go to the Library of Congress, The Fellowship of the Ring (listed this way in Books in Print) will be listed as “Lord of the Rings, Vol. 1.” And J.R.R. Tolkien will be listed as “John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.”

But the biggest problem was, by far, digital rights. There are three million books in the public domain: those published before 1928. “So they’re not exactly the latest and greatest pageturners,” said Crawford, who revealed himself with such statements to be more interested in digitizing books rather than reading them. Less than a million books have clear ownership. Two and a half million books are available though partnership programs with publishers. “And then there’s all the rest in the middle: out of print but under copyright.”

The Google eBookstore, launched in December, aims to fix some of these problems. “We view the ebook as a thing you purchased,” said Crawford. “Once you’ve bought it, we feel you should read it on any device.” But what about the device known as the printed book? Crawford didn’t mention this. He was on a roll.

“We have the only really serious web reader in the business,” boasted Crawford. And it suddenly occurred to me that Crawford was referring to these Google tools as “an ebook ecosystem.” This seemed a bit Napoleonic to me, almost like insisting that one automobile plant was singlehandedly responsible for the car industry.

Crawford also brought up Google Cloud Sync, which collected a surprising amount of personal information. “We have in the cloud both the content of the book and we store the databases of what people have bought and what pages you are reading on.” In other words, if you shop at Google, they know all the books that you’ve bought. Crawford didn’t specify the degree to which this information is shared to other vendors. But he did point out that retailers had much of this intel at their disposal.

I was also troubled by Google’s tendency to dictate to the market what it wanted. “We want to help the independent bookstores do well in the digital age and not be hurt by digital.” Now I happen to share Google’s view that bringing in independent bookstores into its eBookstore is one method of preserving independent business. On the other hand, why should Google decide what’s right? Isn’t that the job of the FTC or an antitrust legislator? And what’s not to suggest that the Google eBookstore could prove harmful towards independent bookstores? On Tuesday, Tom Turvey — another Google Books representative — had said that he had “some of his best engineers working” on the experience of replicating a bookstore. Google may say that they are trying to help the indies now. But what’s to stop them from changing their policy if the books market shifts direction? This affiliate program for this is presently invitation only, but there are plans to open it up.

Crawford also revealed how libraries, faced with limited budgets, had relied on Google’s viewer for electronic versions of books. “They can take our viewer and put it on their website.” I don’t think it occurred to many in the crowd that commingling public and private resources may not necessarily be the most ethical solution. Wasn’t it vaguely predatory? Such questions had led the European Union to develop Europeana.

Crawford pointed out that many books published in the 16th and the 17th century were now available through Google in full color. But I was dubious when he said, “You can see them as if you’re the librarian.” Until we are able to touch these tomes, this statement will never be true. When Crawford brought up L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, observing “there are all these chapters that didn’t make it into the movie,” it was evident that he was on boilerplate and had not tailored his speech too much for the publishing crowd.

Google had recently signed an agreement with Hachette to work together on out-of-print titles in France. This would be the model for further uplift contracts. Google had also been experimenting with maps for books. Crawford brought up this interactive map for Around the World in Eighty Days. Google Books has also been used to chart how irregular verbs turn regular over time (e.g., “spoilt” transforming into “spoiled”) and, of course, the infamous Ngram Viewer, in which you can (for example) compare “The United States is” against “The United States are” over the course of time. But Crawford was disingenuous when he suggested that the dropoff of books referencing the start of a decade (as seen through the Ngram viewer) demonstrated “scientifically” that memories are getting shorter. Before making such a statement, one must account for the number of books published over the years, the speed of life in 1900 vs. the speed of life in subsequent decades, and any number of independent variables. Unfortunately, that kind of rigorous consideration isn’t always compatible with a slick Powerpoint presentation that must be delivered in nanoseconds.

Crawford also had a rather naive faith in international titles. One of his slides championed how “cross-boarder [sic] sales increased access to content,” but didn’t account for the territorial restrictions that Andrew Savikas and Evan Schnittman duked it out over on Tuesday. “As long as the publisher has worldwide rights,” said Crawford, “they should be able to move around the world.” Right. As long as I wake up tomorrow with wings on my back, I’ll be able to fly. In other words, that qualifier was a big if. If this was the type of vision that Google Books was promulgating, I wondered if Crawford’s work was clunkier and less state of the art than he realized.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if his Chinese food takeout history can be Googled.

Author: Ken Auletta

Subjects Discussed: Clarifying Auletta’s theory of Sergey Brin and Larry Page as “cold engineers,” responding to Nicholson Baker’s review, whether an engineer’s viewpoint is applicable to business, the efficiency of newspapers, Talking Points Memo, journalism that is translatable to the online medium, addressing the Gray Lady’s deficiencies, the McSweeney’s answer to the newspaper, Coach Bill Campbell, Eric Schmidt, Brin and Page’s apparent insensitivity to the book industry, Al Gore’s observations about Google’s eccentricities, the Google Chrome EULA controversy, user trust, the moral dilemma of Google Book Search, whether Google should be recused to some degree because the world has become increasingly privatized, the CIA and outsourcing, whether or not Google Book Search’s threat to an author’s livelihood has been overstated, Google’s obsession with 150, comparisons between Itek and Google, collapsing computers, Auletta’s affinity for control, Eric Schmidt’s views on promotional value, Rupert Murdoch’s recent dealings with Bing, CBS’s early involvement in YouTube, traditional media and online advertising, when Google is efficient, and investigating the semantics of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” mantra.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: There’s one question that is presented in the book, but never actually quite answered. It’s probably something I just observed. And that is Google’s fixation with the number 150. They have 150 projects. They have cafeterias and conference rooms that are max 150. Did you ever get an answer as to why they were obsessed with this number? Numerologists?

Auletta: (laughs) I don’t think they’re obsessed with the 150 products. In fact, now they’re probably below 150 projects. The 150 — Larry [Page] actually did a search. Larry’s fixated on 150. It’s the size of cafeterias. To have people collaborate and talk to each other and not pull back and engage. And he did a Google search and came up with that answer to confirm his instinct. Now have I done that search to check that he’s right? No, I have not. But he, in his scientific way, came up with that answer. And he goes around the cafeterias. And he’ll say, “This is too big. This is the right size.” You know, each of them have little fetishes that they’re passionate about. And they’re insistent on. And that’s one of Larry Page’s. And who’s to say he’s wrong? They’ve done pretty good.

Correspondent: Let’s go back to the three horses you were talking about earlier. Google is developing anywhere from 150 projects to less, as we’ve just established. Search revenue is starting to dwindle. I’m curious if some of the more recent products — like, for example, Chrome OS, which is an open-source scenario, and Google Wave — these are a little bit different from the norm. Because the learning curve is a little bit more. It’s something that’s more designed for geeks than for regular people. Do you see this as a way of them anticipating that more regular people, more lay people, will become power users? Or are they just essentially carrying on with the same instinct that drove their company in the first place? Which was, “Let’s go ahead and do this and the revenue will come later.”

Auletta: Everything’s a jump all. Everything is “Let’s experiment. Let’s try this.” And that’s part of the genius of Google and the genius of the two founders. Their willingness to try things. To basically ask uncomfortable questions. And the why question: “Why not?” They come into every meeting and they say, Why not? So why not do Chrome? Why not do Wave? Why not have cloud computing? We have this computer capacity? Why don’t we utilize it? And why do people have to spend three hundred some odd dollars for Microsoft packaged software? Why not have it in the cloud which will follow you wherever you go on any device you’re on? So they’re asking those questions and they’re trying those things. And I think it’s much more the latter point. It’s basically: Let’s take some risks. We have the resources to do it. And wouldn’t this really be cool?

Correspondent: Or maybe it’s just a natural expansion. For some reason, reading your book, I was struck very much by the history of Itek in the ’60s. You know, Itek, where they were the people behind Project CORONA. And they just gobbled up companies left and right. Similar to what Microsoft did two, three decades later. But Google is a little bit different in the sense that everything is essentially developed in-house. Does this ensure that they won’t implode like Itek and, to some degree, Microsoft?

Auletta: But Google buys. They bought Android.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Auletta: They didn’t invent that. They bought it and took the guy who invented it. And he’s there running Android for them. Mobile device business. One of the dangers they have — and, for instance, the argument is that they don’t have a social network engine. So they’ve been slower in that area. So you noticed yesterday, what they did, they announced that search would extend to social networks in real time. And it’s a weakness they have. And it’s a weakness that any company, if you rely just internally. It can be a weakness if you just go out and acquire, and outsource everything. They’re trying to do both. Will they succeed? I don’t know. No one knows. The game continues and there’s no end in sight. But at some point, we’ll find out. Other great companies failed and then came back. Apple failed and then came back. So I take a long view of this stuff. They are trying things, but they’re getting large. And as you get large, you start losing creative people.

(Image: JD Lasica)

BSS #315: Ken Auletta (Download MP3)

There was a good deal of swagger at the panel titled “Google Book Search: Past, Present, and Future.” And I don’t believe the Scrooge parallels in the title were entirely unintentional. But it was my second favorite panel of the day.

“I’m happy to geek out about copyright,” announced Orwant at the onset. But everybody wanted to hear him talk about Google Book Search. Google has some seven million books indexed. It’s “a platform for searching, discover, reading, and buying.” (Fun fact: The word “buy” appears six times in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” — I know this thanks to Google Book Search — and it is always used, in all cases, in relation to buying items for the poor. But this may not have be the “buying” that Orwant or Google have in mind.) Google Book Search has a Partner Program, in which the rights holder wants the content searchable, with boxes of books and PDFs sent Google’s way for OCR magic. It also has a Library Project, in which 100 million books are checked out of libraries and scanned. Google, Orwant says, doesn’t charge for it. No money exchanges hands. Charity! Nevertheless, the “buying” participle still exists in that “platform” designation.

Thanks to a concept called blending, Google Book Search options remain in the top search results. An effort to direct traffic GBS’s way. For while Google is the patron of GBS, GBS must be kept profitable. You didn’t think they were doing this out of the goodness of their heart now, did you?

There are 1.5 million free books, all public domain titles, available on Google. But if you want to access them, well, you’ll have to go to Google. Or you’ll have to have Google generate results at your site. Because the Google team are specialists in latency. They can do things with milliseconds that you couldn’t work out in your dreams. As an experiment, Google recently unleashed Google Books Mobile, which means that you can nose search Google Book Search from your smartphone, assuming that Thomas Friedman isn’t hogging all the bandwidth on the island. Orwant was careful to point out that Google is not in the handset manufacturing or carrier business. But he anticipated, just as many of the seer-like speakers at Tools of Change did based on sketchy inside information, a “rapid evolution.” Nevertheless, because someone had cracked a Twitter joke about reading Ulysses, there remained the possibility that someone was using GBM for serious literary endeavors. Why? “I personally have no idea,” rejoined Orwant to his own question. This was an experiment to see what usage will be like in the next few years. Google wishes to dominate.

The revelation about 1.5 million free ebooks prompted Cory Doctorow to press Orwant on a question about why these couldn’t be released as a torrent. A sensible idea. But you see, Google needs to keep these books on their site. Because they’re constantly tinkering with the display results. Latency and other assorted topics of expertise, remember? And there is no evidence that GBS harms sales. Trust Orwant on that.

Tim O’Reilly tried to badger Orwant too. You see, O’Reilly used to have good webpage placement for many of his titles. But those days are gone, replaced by Google Book Search results above the O’Reilly pages. And that hardly seems fair. “It’s not me; it’s the algorithm,” responded Orwant. But wasn’t Orwant one of the guys who came up or oversaw the algorithm? Orwant may have only been following orders, but it did raise a very important point. If a publisher has a specific webpage for a book title, should they not have that webpage come up in the search results before a GBS page?

There’s some comfort in knowing that 99% of the books at GBS have been viewed at least once. Even the sleep-inducing textbooks. Which is really quite something. Which brings us to the future, which is based on the past, which does not involve thrown mugs. You see, Orwant was once the editor and publisher of a magazine. Subscription base: 12,000. (He said at the panel that he did not know what he was doing.) Orwant loitered in a bookstore and watched people picked up his magazine and would approach them for insights. (He said he did not know what he was doing.) He learned valuable lessons about pictures, the size of the title, and other layout factors. (He said he did not know what he was doing. But as we learned above, he’s no amateur.) So if Orwant did not know what he was doing, he certainly wanted to figure out these trends. Perhaps in telling us that he did not know what he was doing, he is actually alerting us to the possibility that his real interest was in tracking. And, lo and behold, now GBS is all about figuring out what people are reading next. It hopes to introduce more options to render these images as XML. Which means text-based pages and character recognition. Which means distributing content further and getting more GBS results. And why are the publishers being so irksome about the price point? They can’t possibly make a profit at $50 a pop, but they can at 50 cents a pop. If the information can’t be free, then it can certainly be brokered at a cheaper price thanks to Google technology. Of course, the price has to work for Google, not the publisher.

That snippet view you see with some titles? Orwant’s official position, pressed by Cory Doctorow, is that it’s fair use. But once the October 2008 settlement in Authors Guild v. Google is approved by the court, you’re going to see that snippet view jump to 20% of the book. But in the meantime, GBS’s dominance is all but confirmed. You’ll begin to see public access terminals in libraries. But there’s always consumer purchasing options. A guy named Adam Smith (no joke) is head of the product. Sure, we’ll reap some benefits of these developments, but it doesn’t feel entirely right that a private and cash-heavy corporation holds all the cards. Particularly one with the smarts to keep a savvy guy like Orwant on the payroll.

In one TGIF in Kirkland, an employee informed Eric Schmidt that Microsoft’s benefits package was richer. He announced himself
genuinely surprised, which genuinely surprised me. Schmidt, in the presence of witnesses, promised to bring the benefits to a par. He consulted HR, and HR informed him that it’d cost Google 22 million a year to do that. So he abandoned the promise and fell back on his tired, familiar standby (”People don’t work at Google for the money. They work at Google because they want to change the world!”). A statement that always seemed to me a little Louis XIV coming from a billionaire.

A company that generates several billions of dollars a year in profit — that reported revenues of $5.54 billion during the third quarter of 2008 — is, from the perspective of CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt, a man who earns a $1 annual salary but who owns more than 10.7 million shares of Google, considered a place where people work simply because they “want to change the world.”

From Emerson’s “Compensation”:

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves. There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others.

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

I should note that “Services” is defined as “your use of Google’s products, software, services, and web sites,” but this is, to say the least, disingenuous. Anyone who uses Chrome will technically own the copyright, but who needs copyright when the Chrome user effectively gives up her right to distribute this content in all perpetuity and without royalties? So if Joyce Carol Oates is using Chrome and types an email to someone, she “owns” the copyright. But Google has the right to use anything that Ms. Oates types into Chrome for any purpose. And if someone reveals highly personal information through Chrome — like, say, the details of one’s sex life, an early draft of a novel, or some very embarrassing incident — Google has the right to reprint this anywhere. And not only do they get to reprint this content, but they can likewise generate revenue from it. Revenue that should, by all rights, go to the person who authored the content in the first place.

You have to hand it to Google. They’ve hit upon a way to take what’s out there on the Web, monetize the content for their own purpose while screwing over the person who labored over the words. Will we see new clauses in publishing contracts contain provisos requesting authors not to use Google Chrome as a web browser? After all, if Google can reprint it, this pretty much eliminates intellectual property rights.

Is this Google’s crafty way of getting around all the YouTube lawsuits and angry publishers? After all, if the content was submitted through Google Chrome, well, Google can reuse it. So if Stephenie Meyer slips up again and she was using Chrome, well, she’ll have no grievance against Google when Google “reprints” it for its “Services.”

So use Google Chrome if you’re perfectly happy watching your words taken by Google. Use Google Chrome if you don’t value your work.

[UPDATE: Based on the public outcry, Google has amended Section 11.1 of the EULA to read as follows:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

The offending sentence has been removed. It's very heartening to see that Google takes these concerns seriously. And because of this, I shall probably take Chrome for a test drive sometime this weekend.]

I’m sure J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon will really appreciate this new feature once some bozo copies and pastes a snippet of HTML somewhere.

We’ll then use all this information for Google Maps, Google AdWords, and a new social network called Google Humiliation. Just be sure to take a few digital photos of the residences that will appear in the Google Maps listing along with physical measurements and personal secrets that might be interesting. After the visit, you submit the residences’ info and photo(s) to Google through your Local Homeland Referrals Office, and we’ll pay you up to $10 for each listing that is approved by Google and verified by at least three of the Resident’s acquaintances.

In fact, if you met a Resident at a bar and secure your way into the Resident’s apartment (what you do with the Resident sexually is really none of our concern, although it would help Google tremendously if you could tell us how they are in the sack!), we’ll pay you extra!

All you need to be a successful Total Information Acquisition Representative is a passion for helping the world know more about Residents, a love of the Internet (some knowledge of how paparazzi photographers invade the lives of celebrities is great, too), and access to a computer and a digital camera.

Remember that Google is your friend. Forget the Fourth Amendment. As we all know, this quaint notion of being “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” is on the way out. This is the wave of the future! Together, we will disseminate every bit of knowledge about every person on the planet!

It’s bad enough that Google Maps has become the ipso facto reference point to meeting up with someone. Much like Google itself, we willingly abdicate our memory banks to Google Maps, which has all the answers. We follow the directions and, if we’re in a rush, we might immediately forget the street names, little realizing that there might be a history to these streets or an enchanting public place few know about to be found behind a set of doors.

Now with the Street View option, Google has granted us the option of pre-judging a particular neighborhood and it diminishes this sense of mystery. A random snapshot, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the neighborhood at its best or its worst, determines whether one should go out and explore it.

It’s precisely because of these reasons that I’ll be avoiding the Street View option whenever possible. While a picture can certainly reveal visual qualities, it is by no means truly representative of a location’s complexities. And some things in life simply aren’t meant to be discovered exclusively from a laptop.

Also, Annalee Newitz has some interesting thoughts on the fundamental differences between Google and YouTube.

Reuters: “Google shares rose to their highest in more than five months ahead of the Internet search company’s announcement after the closing bell that it would pay $1.65 billion in stock for YouTube.”

I pretty much approve any comments that come through on that entry. I grew up in a number of crummy impoverished suburbs. So I can understand the need to vent. But the thread has transformed into something that has revealed reasons for why people stay there, with various people contemplating its identity and why they continue to stay there. The phenomenon is not unlike what was once described in this New Yorker item. Could it be that Google search results actually empower people to communicate in a constructive manner and that the resulting discourse (framed, I might add, within an information structure) causes people to find meaning rather than engage in another pointless flamewar? Maybe this is the phenomenon that Wikipedia has tried to latch onto: given a textual context, Internet communication becomes meaningful and orderly in a Howard Rheingold kind of way.

As you know, AAP has a Board of Directors that is elected by our members and empowered by AAP’s bylaws to make decisions and take actions on behalf of the entire AAP membership. Quite often, issues that eventually come before the Board for decisions and actions are initially explored and considered by one or more of AAP’s committees and divisions. AAP staff routinely work to facilitate participation in these committees and divisions by all interested members, and members are always encouraged to contact AAP staff to make known their interests, concerns and views on relevant matters.

I tried hunting around the AAP site to see if I could locate a copy of these bylaws. Given that the publishing industry is a mighty and multifarious zoo populated by animals of different stripes, I figured (perhaps naively) that any large organization might have some exigencies for allowing minority opinions (such as Nash’s) to be voiced and considered, if not outright memorialized before the Board. Alas, no such luck.

However, I did locate this list of the Board of Directors. And I’m not certain if the Board’s current makeup genuinely reflects the industry as a whole. Sure, we have the big behemoths (with Houghton Mifflin as chair, Random House as vice chair) well represented. But aside from a few midsize educational publishers, why isn’t a single member of the board a small or midsize fiction publisher? Surely, any board hoping to represent the entire publishing industry would fill at least one slot along these lines. Then again, “small publisher” probably means something fundamentally different to me than it does to Pat Schroeder.

Further, the AAP’s lawsuit seems to work against their stated agenda. Among the AAP’s goals: “To expand the market for American books and other published books in all media” (emphasis mine) and “To aid AAP member publishers in exploring the challenges and opportunities of the emerging technologies.”

So we’re left with the AAP’s letter to Nash, which is, as Nash notes, “civil” but ultimately a bit dismissive towards anyone who disagrees with the unquestionable wisdom of the mighty Board (“We would certainly welcome the opportunity to answer any questions you may have regarding the basis for AAP’s actions, and perhaps to even persuade you to reconsider your disagreement with those actions.”).

In other words, the sense I’m getting here is that, if you happen to be an AAP member and you have a different spin on an issue that the representative board is considering, not only are your thoughts disregarded when the Board decides upon a course of action that has a tremendous effect on the whole (and, in this case, the lasting power of backlist titles), but the Board doesn’t offer a viable alternative that might help the member explore the “opportunities of the emerging technologies.”

So I have to ask: Is the AAP really there for its Google Library-friendly members? Or does this lawsuit exist to appease the big boys rather than considering this issue holistically?

In Earlier Drafts:

“Google is like that mail order catalog that comes in the mail when your checking account balance is low.”

“Google is like that burned spot at the top of your mouth, just after you’ve finished eating a few slices of pizza.”

“Google is like that final orchestral moment in the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life.’ It sounds impressive but goes on too long.”

“Google is like whiskers you forgot to shave under your nose. You don’t mind them, but you can’t wait to go home and shave them off.”

Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.

The story in question revealed a variety of personal information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt (all findable through Google) and made a point about Google collecting detailed personal information about its users that it doesn’t make public.

It seems that Google has a double standard here.

The PATRIOT Act authorizes the Department of Justice (and its related entities) to keep track of booklists that citizens check out at libraries or buy from bookstores, presumably based on the silly logic that anyone who reads A Catcher in the Rye (which would include a sizable cluster of high school students) is going to transform overnight into Mark David Chapman.

But Google Scholar fits the bill so exactly that one wonders what relationship the company might have with the government. If Google’s infamous cookie (which resides on a system until 2037) remains in play through Google Scholar, the big question is why does Google need this data? To service its users or to profit while compromising an individual’s privacy? What happens when a teenager trying to come to terms with his sexual orientation looks for a book on the subject to see if his urges are biologically normal? None of these very sizable concerns is addressed in the FAQ.