Google gets it

I've been toying recently with the notion that a fully searchable knowledge base will change the world. It isn't just self-congratulatory blogsterbation, but a real belief that what we're up to here, sharing knowledge both immediately reactive to world events and stored and indexed for others to find, has the potential to make us all more involved in how this world functions, and the way in which it does.

Anyway. Google, no surprise, seems to see this. Their Google Print initiative will catalogue the contents of all books, ever. This will make books useful to me and everyone else who will grow up with the internet (and believe me - mine will be the last generation to know how to use the Dewey decimal system, and maybe even what it is). Without Google Print, the use of books will cease outside academic circles. Suing Google to stop this is stupid unless you don't like books.

I'll quote at length from an excellent argument made by Google's Eric Schmidt:

Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World and Third, en toute langue -- and all, of course, entirely for free. How many users will find, and then buy, books they never could have discovered any other way? How many out-of-print and backlist titles will find new and renewed sales life? How many future authors will make a living through their words solely because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered audience to find them? This egalitarianism of information dispersal is precisely what the Web is best at; precisely what leads to powerful new business models for the creative community; precisely what copyright law is ultimately intended to support; and, together with our partners, precisely what we hope, and expect, to accomplish with Google Print.