Introduction: Homes for Good (Orphan) Books

In the last few years, books have energetically joined smaller niches of content in the digital uplift of the twenty-first century. Part of this sudden transition was the development of imaging systems that permitted individuals and companies to digitize at a pace never previously imagined. Technology, as it so often does, turned in part from facilitator to catalyst.

Yet technology never determines applications, and it was the release of Google's vision for a searchable online repository for the world's printed books that ignited the imagination of countless people and organizations, with a dollop of uncertainty on the part of every principal involved: authors, whose intellectual creations became suddenly transformed into a binary index; publishers, who wondered what role in distribution they would have in a visible future where Amazon and Google could surface their most valuable assets; libraries, who wondered if there would be a role for anything beyond warehousing print books gathering dust on shelves; and scholars, who worried about the quality of the book's online presence while exulting in the new capacities to find information, and combine it with a heterogeneity of sources never before imagined.

As libraries wonder which of their volumes they should digitize, and publishers contemplate the establishment of their own online repositories for digital content, only Amazon, and more importantly Google, combine an encompassing aggregation of content with a user-facing presence. This may yet change as backend providers of publishing services such as Ingram contemplate their role in a world increasingly revolving around media distribution, but their entrance into mindshare would lag behind the somber weight of established usage in online search (Google) and commerce (Amazon). Google, particularly, stands uniquely able to offer a combined mass of public domain, out-of-print, and in-print volumes, combined with scholarly journal material and overlays of temporal and geographic information that bring previously high-end supercomputer-class data-mining to any device that is able to join the world's increasingly pervasive network.

It is worthwhile noting that it is this—the growing presence of the Internet in people's daily lives—that stands to profoundly disrupt scholarship and reading. It is not the issue merely of having content digitized, but rather the near-constant availability of that information combined with the means to find it with search, that enables disruptions in how we use books, and ultimately how we write books. Network ubiquity makes Amazon's Kindle ebook reader distinctive enough to prove that content acquisition can be serendipitous; that Googling on a powerful mobile phone or computing device can be deeply utilitarian rather than merely demonstrative of cool technology; and that research and education are being profoundly reshaped by the ability of users to engage with information from anyplace, and at anytime, where they can provide sufficient attention to the task.

Libraries, publishers, authors, scholars, and readers all hitherto were located in a multifaceted milieu in which time for learning and enjoyment were limited not merely by the constraints of daily living, but by the availability of acquiring the means by which those goals could be accomplished. The lessening of those barriers warps a set of organizational relationships, economic environments, social practices, and legal frameworks to the point where they all must gently yet persuasively lean like bamboo in the wind, or snap like brittle kindling.

Like many, I've recently been thinking a lot about the availability of books in online searchable repositories, and the likely outcomes for publishers, libraries, and the public. I have even been considering the impact of a rapprochement between publishers, authors, and Google over books whose availability is most savagely contested, largely because their legal status has been brought into a hazy dawn of uncertainty by the startling recent shifts in availability that catch them stranded between public goods and private property.

A significant portion of these implicated works are likely to be out-of-print, of uncertain copyright status, and no longer present in any publisher's archive—available only in the less-visited shelves of the largest research libraries. This substantial category, numbering in the millions of books, would...