Google and the World Brain Page #3

ultimately scan all books

and all printed material.

'When automobiles came along first,

'they seemed likely to become

a rich man's monopoly.

'They cost upward

of a thousand pounds.

'Henry Ford altered all that.

'He put the poor man on the road.

'We want a Henry Ford today

'to modernise the distribution

of knowledge,

'make good knowledge cheap and easy,

'in this still very ignorant,

ill-educated,

'ill-served English-speaking world

of ours,

'which might be the greatest power

on Earth for the good of mankind.'

We started the Internet Archive

in 1996.

The idea was to have all

the published works of humankind

available to everybody,

that this was the opportunity

of our generation,

that...like the previous generation

had put a man on the moon.

The Internet Archive had been

completely open with Google.

In fact, I'd gone and given

a speech that was attended

by, I think, all of the senior

executives

on how one could go about

building a digital library

of all books, music, video,

and I'd hoped that there was going

to be a way to work with them,

but that was not to be.

Libraries had signed secret

agreements with Google...

We didn't know what

was really going on.

When it started coming out

as a completely separate project,

and not working with others,

then, I started

to become suspicious.

Larry Page,

who founded Google with me,

first proposed that we digitise

all books a decade ago,

when we were a fledgling start-up.

Five years later, in 2004,

Google Books was born.

Despite a number of important

digitisation efforts to date,

none have been at a comparable scale,

simply because no-one else has chosen

to invest the requisite resources.

If Google Books is successful,

others will follow.

I don't think that Google is aware

of the fact that it's a corporation.

I think Google does think

of itself as an NGO

that just happens

to make a lot of money.

And they think of themselves

as social reformers

who just happen to have their stock

traded on stock exchanges

and who just happen to have

investors and shareholders,

but they do think of themselves

as ultimately being in the business

of making the world better.

There are few more irreparable

property losses

than vanished books.

Nature, politics and war

have always been

the mortal enemies of written works.

Most recently, Hurricane Katrina

dealt a blow

to the libraries of the Gulf Coast.

At Tulane University, the main

library sat in nine feet of water.

In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge regime,

in Cambodia,

decimated cultural institutions

throughout the country.

Khmer Rouge fighters took over

the National Library

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