“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google doesn’t say it wants to be the only source of the world’s information, but it has now moved a step closer to monopoly in the book search area. 

Microsoft dropped its book digitization project, stating “Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content.”

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive is “disappointed” and plans to keep up his book-digitizing efforts. But along with Microsoft’s thus far unsuccessful struggles to absorb Yahoo!, the death of Microsoft’s book-digitizing project is another sign that the company that defined the software industry is having a hard time shifting to the new economy defined by bits themselves rather than the computer programs that manipulate bits. 

Harvard’s University Librarian, Robert Darnton, has a good piece in the New York Review of Books on the future of research libraries. It begins, “Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?” 

Nice metaphor, Professor Darnton! (Full disclosure: We were far from the first to use it. “Information Explosion” is the title of a paper by Latanya Sweeney, and the image surely wasn’t original with her either.)

While we’re at it, a tip of the hat to my colleague Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard’s open-access policy for research papers. He’s just been named head of Harvard’s newly created Office of Scholarly Communications.