Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe (Paperback)

~ Jean-Noel Jeanneney (Author), Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translator), Ian Wilson (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* From Europe's point of view, Google's proposal to digitize the contents of America's leading libraries raises questions beyond the copyright issues that presently beleaguer the project. This brief salvo from the president of France's Bibliotheque Nationale challenges directly Google's assertion that its venture offers a source of universal knowledge. Jeanneney finds such a claim spurious and utopian. For by the very nature of the library collections that Google proposes to put online, American and British works will dominate, leaving behind that portion of the world's hundred million books not in English. Moreover, the character of digital search engines necessarily ranks results according to algorithms that reflect prejudices that lack universal validity. This quarrel is at least as ancient within librarianship as card catalogs. Jeanneney believes that Google's retrievals as presently constituted pass to the reader the merely noetic, not truly the intelligent, insightful, thoughtful, and genuinely helpful information implied by the notion of universal knowledge. Google's commercial status also troubles Jeanneney, for the commoditization of information by a single corporation inevitably subjects it to sale and to control by a less-benign owner. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"The president of the French national library has made himself the frontman in what he sees as a struggle to save cultural diversity. In the postmodern world, the battleground is the Internet. Here, search engines determine what tomorrow's generations will click on, learn, and think." - Financial Times "Provides a crucial dissenting opinion.... The Google war chest has all but secured dominance over smaller library efforts, like the author's own project to digitize the French national collection. History judges societies by how they treat their most disadvantaged members. This book asks only that the Google economy be held to the same standard." - David Ng, Forbes "A take on world Googlization you're not likely to get from your broker.... [Jeanneney] brings his own high-wattage bulb to enlighten us. Be thankful we didn't ban French fries, French wine, and this very illuminating French book." - Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer"

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Product Details

• Paperback: 108 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (October 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226395782
• ISBN-13: 978-0226395784
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #874,260 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Advocating for a European alternative to Google Book Search, December 17, 2006

By	Clifford Anderson (Cranbury, NJ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe (Hardcover)

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the president of the National Library of France, sounds a clarion call to his fellow Europeans: organize a large-scale, Europe-wide digitization project or risk ceding the dissemination of Europe's cultural heritage to the whim of an American corporation. He argues not so much against the globalization of knowledge per se but more against what he considers Google's incomplete form of globalization, which inevitably favors Anglo-American cultural products above the rest of the world's. The alternative Jeanneney proposes relies primarily on public funding; although he does not exclude the participation of the private sector, he would like to see the European response to Google emerge from carefully crafted agreements between national libraries and other cultural institutions.

Jeanneney comes across as a savvy politician who knows how to organize European-wide initiatives. He puts together a long list of all the national and European agencies he thinks should become involved in the project. The number of people from different agencies and industries and nations who need to be consulted contrasts sharply with Google's straight-forward plan to get started. I guess a lot depends on whether you think good ideas emerge more frequently from garages in Silicon Valley or meeting parlors in Brussels. Pragmatists like William James and John Dewey taught Americans to exercise healthy skepticism against affording "experts" in any field of knowledge an undue level of influence. The democratization of knowledge should generally decrease the cultural weight of the elite, who tend to privilege their social situation more than they let on. Is the danger of political elitism not as serious as that of economic plebeianism? Obviously, Jeanneney speaks to Americans across a philosophical divide about the role of the state in promoting culture.

Jeanneney is at pains throughout "Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge" to make clear that he is offering a constructive proposal. However, despite his protestations that he is not out simply to criticize Google, his argument depends on demonstrating that Google has gone about digitizing and organizing the world's information in a wrongheaded way. "...The errors (I'm speaking euphemistically) committed by Google are instructive," he writes. "Whatever it does, we should do the opposite."

Jeanneney's argument against Google's approach to digitization fails in the end to convince in part because he operates with several unconvincing assumptions. His fundamental presupposition is that not all printed books can be digitized. This leads him to pose the all-important question of how properly to select those books which will be digitized. However, is it really "beyond what we can reasonably envision" to conceive of digitizing "all the books that have been printed since the time of Gutenberg"? Google has made a prodigious start toward this goal and has since been joined by Microsoft and other competitors. Who is to say that the vast majority of the world's literature will not eventually be digitized because of such private initiatives? The objection that selections must be made will then be rendered moot, as Jeanneney tacitly concedes.

Among his other questionable assumptions is, for example, Jeanneney's contention that Google's search technology homogenizes knowledge by returning over and again only the most highly-ranked results. He worries about the cultural effect of returning what he terms the "gondola end" of information, by which he means that only the most popular books will be seen by most searchers. The underlying worry is that French and other European literature will never be discovered. It's interesting to juxtapose Jeanneney's concern about the "gondola end" of searches with Chris Anderson's discussion of the "long tail." Anderson argues convincingly that the digital era has greatly expanded our access to otherwise inaccessible and difficult-to-find materials. His claim is that the real action is in the "long tail," not in the "gondola end," and that cultural sphere has become far richer and more diverse since the commercialization of the Internet. What makes Google such a good search engine, after all? Among its virtues is its uncanny ability to return the needle-in-the-haystack result, which might otherwise remain hidden forever in some obscure webpage. Google is all about discoverability, not about simply directing its users to the same old sites over and again. Why shouldn't Google's Book Search operate the same way?

Jeanneney makes much of the distinction between information and knowledge. He cites Michael Gorman, past president of the American Library Association, with approval for contending that that books should be read all the way through, not simply as snippets. It's not the case, however, that most users are seeking to replace the experience of reading books with searching for snippets in books. What many scholars are looking for when using Google Book Search is a list of books to read. Again, it's about discoverability. Google Book Search provides information about where to go about gaining knowledge. It may be that the next place to turn is the library or bookstore. Jeanneney recognizes as much when he argues that new forms of media do not generally replace the media which preceded it. He contends, quite rightly in my estimation, that Google Book Search will not replace the printed book. (Why he feels it necessary then to advocate protectionist policies for bookstores and publishers is not clear.) Google provides an additional tool for gaining knowledge. Let's hope that Jeanneney's Europeans will contribute another such tool.

"Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge" provides valuable insight into the way that traditional European librarians and brokers of culture think. Jeanneney provides a good case for taking a more cautious and methodical approach to digitization and organization, although American readers will have to disregard a few silly and nonsensical digs against market-oriented capitalism when reading it. "Upon what principle is [Google's search algorithm] founded?" asks Jeanneney. "Like the basic ingredient of Coca-Cola, it remains a well-guarded corporate secret." (I'm confident that Coca-Cola's basic ingredient is water in any case.) But, in general, Jeanneney's book serves its readers by raising critical questions about the commercial origins of many current digitization projects and by pointing out the cultural significance of making the full variety of the world's printed literature more readily accessible to anyone with access to an Internet connection.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A French Socialists View, January 6, 2007

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe (Hardcover)

This book gets five stars because of the way it so clearly expresses it's point of view.

M. Jeanneney has written this book as a tirade against Google publishing books on line. He seems to have three main arguments:

1. Google is digitizing books that are in English.
2. It is being done in America.
3. It's being done by a private company.

Taking the last point first, on Page 15 he says: 'A collection (of digitized books) whose permanence will be guaranteed over the long tern, as only public institutions can promise and ensure.' And on Page 62 he talks about what might happen if Google goes bankrupt. This is a good socialist view. But I find myself thinking that France capitulated to the Germans in World War II. Does he really think that the Germans would have left the collection in place if it contained the books that they had publicly burned not so long before? Does he think that the mainland Chinese would be good custodians of books written in Taiwan? Or that the Muslims who burned the Great Library of Alexandria would protect Jewish literature?

The book seems to make the assumption that thee are two alternatives, turn everything over to Google, or create a Government Agency to do everythign. This is not, however the situation. There are no standards of on line books digitization. Project Gutenberg does it one way, Google does it another, as does the University of Michigan and many others. There are (as of today) almost 50,000 entries in the Books-On-Line 'Card Catalog' of on-line publications.

Meanwhile, M. Jeanneney is forming committees, planning to set up a digital library, wanting to do a new search engine more suited for literature, and writing books. Meanwhile, others are skipping the committees and digitizing away.

4.0 out of 5 stars Google Domination - Another View, November 28, 2007

By	Gregg Eldred (Avon Lake, OH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a book that I happened across while perusing the new books area at the library. Small, at only 92 pages, this is a book that you should read.

Jean-Noel Jeanneney is president of the Bibliotheque nationale de France, professor at the Institut d'etudes politique de Paris, past executive director of Radio-France and Radio-France International, and has also worked for the government of President Francois Mitterrrand as secretary of state for foreign trade and secretary of state for communications. I tell you this, as it is important to know Mr. Jeanneney's background. Especially as this book concerns Google Books. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge takes a European look at the efforts of Google to digitize the world's books. There are two points to this, right off the bat. First, this book was translated from French. According to the author, very few books are translated into English (the major exceptions are the "classics"). Second, this is a thought provoking book from a totally different viewpoint. I think that we take Google for granted but Jeanneney does not. He talks about how Google's efforts are primarily with English speaking countries, that important works from European countries will be overlooked, and that by providing the search, you will lose important context. All very valid arguments.

Many people will disagree with his position, especially since the digitization is currently underway (and because he is French), but this is an excellent book examining the thought processes of librarians. They really want to get their information out to more people, and Google Books is one such avenue. However, Jeanneney raises important questions and shows the cultural issues surrounding Google's efforts. He also asks why a private enterprise is taking on this project, when governments or libraries should be banding together to make this a reality.

I really enjoyed reading this as it was facinating viewpoint. I don't think that many people would take the time to pick up this book, as very few people would actually care about Google Books or a European argument debating its merits. But I think that I am better for having read it.