Let's start at the beginning--Call me Ishmael. Or rather, let's take it from another beginning--just call me Google. Since their inception in 2004, Google Books and Google Scholar have been making headlines for their lofty goals and, well, battling it out with lots of angry authors and publishers. They've become the epicenter for one of the more tumultuous discussions of our generation: How much do we allow technology to change us? At least, that's what I think this argument is really all about. On Google Books, you can search a book and it will return previews, and in some non-copyrighted cases, the entire book for you to consume. I searched for Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and was presented with a "limited preview" (the first 25 pages, back cover, and front cover)--all in a neatly packed PDF, right there on my screen. It's sort of magnificent. But I'm going to be honest here. What I found most enchanting about the scanned book were the crease marks on its spine; the physical proof that someone else had entered the world I was swimming in. Google Books search technology is far beyond that kind of physical marker. It uses Optical Character Recognition to search the 7 million scanned books for the phrase or title you type in. It leaves no trace.

In July of 2009, the Berkman Center at Harvard University hosted a workshop to discuss "the opportunity for unprecedented access by the public, scholars, libraries and others to a digital library." This is after two separate lawsuits, Authors Guild v. Google and McGraw Hill v. Google, in 2005. In essence, the workshop was a focused discussion about the major criticisms received by Google Books, without the limitations of sticking to the Google name. There are concerns about copyright, authorship, and disproportionate language representation (the majority of Google Books are in English). All of these questions are the stepping stones to this shift in literature and thought.

That brings us to Google Scholar, a tool that indexes full texts of scholarly literature across several publishing formats and disciplines. It's less controversial, probably because Academics are used to having their scholarly papers posted all around the internet in places like Scopus, Web of Science, and JSTOR. I'm glad to have access to a scholarly search that doesn't require a subscription. The only Google Scholar criticisms I've encountered are things like deficiency in coverage and up-to-dateness. Their successes are just as luke-warm--well, in the sense that they're not changing the way we view humanity like Google Books. Scholar provides citation analysis, related articles, and access to articles that have cited the one searched . . . you know, that sort of thing. Sometimes it's the smaller-scale changes that make the difference. I used Scholar for research on the La Brea tar pits, which is being turned into an essay that will reach a larger audience; informed enough to be interesting/entertaining, but not the sort of thing that's concerned about copyright law. So, although Google Books is attracting a lot of attention, the quieter transitions like Scholar have a striking amount of influence over the ways we read, research, and communicate.

Even though I'm not a huge fan of lawsuits, I like the fact that people on both sides of the spectrum (we'll call them the pens and the keys) are putting forth as much integrity as they can muster. They're spending thousands of hours in court rooms, probably neglecting their families, bodies, and mental sanity, in order to come to some compromise in this literary-technological debacle. We're still trying to figure out what exactly it will mean to have many if not most of our books available online. There's no doubt it's taking time, but we're getting closer, I think. So let's end at the end, a place we're unsure about, where maybe we'll end up like Melville's Rachael, meandering the vague seas of the future, where instead of finding what she sought, "only found another orphan."