A big battle is brewing in of all places the library. It all started when Google, the Internet search engine and media giant, began scanning millions of books without permission. That led the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to file a class-action suit. Now a $125 million settlement might be in the offing that could lead to a book registry for author and publisher rights and royalties and a huge online archive of millions of books.

Meanwhile, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo have joined the Open Book Alliance, a coalition opposed to the settlement because they claim it gives Google the rights to commercialize digital copies of books.

Submissions to the court are likely to bring these and other objections forward.

The Alliance (also called the “Sour Grapes Alliance” by Google) claims Google and the authors and publishers schemed to monopolize access, distribution and pricing of the largest digital database of books in the world.

Besides Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon, the Alliance also has in its ranks nonprofit author groups, library institutions, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the New York Library Association.

Alliance members fear the Google Book Search Settlement will restore access to millions of out-of-print books and will one day make Google a virtual digital library monopoly. The Open Content Alliance (not to be confused with the “Open Book Alliance”) opposes the Google settlement because “orphan books” can be commercialized.

 Orphan books, although out of print, remain under copyright and the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found. OCA suspects Google will become the legal guardian of millions of books. Google has been scanning the pages of those and others as part of its plan to bring a digital library and bookstore, unprecedented in scope, to computer screens across the United States.

According to Michael Kirkland, speaking for Google, the settlement will feature full online access for purchase. Institutional subscriptions will allow patrons access to the entire corpus of scanned books. Each public library in the country will also have a free public access terminal available.

Brent Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic advocate group for civil rights, education and employment opportunities, submitted an amicus letter to Judge Denny Chin supporting the settlement. Although he confined his argument to rather conventional school and library interface there is a broader argument to make.

U.S. education is unique because of an ethic that a curious person wanting to learn something should have access to that knowledge. That ethic arose when Andrew Carnegie, soon after the 1900s, underwrote and encouraged a system of about 3,000 free public libraries in 47 states. Almost all municipalities soon followed the example with city libraries for self-guided and reference instruction. There are today more than 123,000 libraries of all kinds, according to the American Library Association.

In U.S. history, the library system, the land-grant college system of 1862 and the community college system after World War II have been among the greatest reform advancements in social and economic development. When the various author, publisher, commercial and anti-trust concerns get worked out in the Google matter, at the heart of any accommodation should be the value about satisfying the curious which has served the nation so well.

And there is one other. Door-to-door encyclopedia salesman convinced many parents in the second half of the last century they needed to make an investment as part of their children’s education. We were reminded of that during Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. She was a beneficiary of that. I was one. Possibly you were too.

The Information Age equivalent of the encyclopedia salesman is at our door, except that now millions of books in hundreds of thousands of libraries in a hundred languages are inside his demonstration case.

 [José de la Isla’s latest digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at [email protected].] © 2009