French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Jacquesson, Google Books and the Future of Digital Libraries
History, Politics and Society

Alain Jacquesson, Google livres et le futur des bibliothèques numériques : historique du projet, techniques documentaires, alternatives et controverses, Paris, Éditions du Cercle de la librairie, "Bibliothèques" series, 2010, 223 p.

• ISBN 13: 978-2-7654-0980-9
• 36 euros

Back Cover

In 2004, the book world learned of a wild project envisioned by two young visionaries: to build a universal digital library within five years. Six years later, a colossal digital library of over 12 million volumes has emerged. Collections that generations of librarians spent centuries building are being swallowed up by Google Books. Never before had a public-private partnership of this scale been undertaken in the field of cultural heritage. Around the world, researchers and the general public alike are gradually becoming accustomed to using Google Books, which now aims to digitize 30 million books.

Achieving this required the development of specialized IT expertise, particularly in mass digitization. The efficiency of this know-how has attracted the interest of numerous libraries that have chosen to participate in the project.

This appropriation of public goods has also sparked considerable controversy. Authors and publishers oppose what they consider a violation of copyright law, both in the United States and in Europe. Many voices have also been raised against the re-privatization of public property: the contents of the world's greatest libraries are returning to the hands of a private corporation that could ultimately hold a monopoly. The size of Google Books' indexes is now measured in billions of word occurrences. Publishers are finding that the commercial landscape is heavily dominated; with the digitization of historical archives, Google Books now possesses content that can easily be monetized.

This book chronicles the genesis of the project, its industrial scale—unusual in the cultural sphere—and details its practical aspects, particularly in terms of library science and documentation techniques. It offers an objective yet critical analysis of this achievement and examines the alternatives to Google Books.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

1.1. Google Inc.

1.2. Two Exceptional Personalities

1.3. The Story of a Spelling Mistake

1.4. The IPO

1.5. Contested Aspects

2. Google and Its Search Engine

2.1. The Google Homepage

2.2. Information Retrieval on Web Pages

2.3. A Silent Revolution

2.4. External Links

2.5. Academic Search

2.6. Popularity: PageRank

2.7. A Competitor: h-index

2.8. Reliability: TrustRank

2.9. Timeliness: FreshRank

3. Strong Interest from Libraries

3.1. First Contact with the University of Michigan Library

3.2. The Cult of Secrecy

3.3. A Receptive Audience at Stanford

3.4. The World's Largest Academic Library: Harvard

3.5. Oxford and the Bodleian Library

3.6. The New York Public Library

3.7. Developing Digitization Techniques

3.8. The Secret Revealed

3.9. First Contacts with Publishers

4. Precursors

4.1. Searching Early Text Repositories

4.1.1. Bibliographic Information Retrieval

4.1.2. Searching Within a Single Text

4.1.3. Searching Within a Corpus

4.1.4. Searching the Broadest Possible Information Space

4.2. Amazon - Search Inside The Book

5. Google Print: The Earthquake of December 14, 200

6. The Digitization Process

6.1. Digital Imaging and Page-Turning Robots

6.2. Converting Image to Text

6.3. Library Workflow Organization

6.4. An Initial Return on Investment

Sidebar: Google Books at the Lausanne Library (Hubert Villard)

7. Google Books in Practice and Criticism

7.1. The Google Books Homepage

7.2. Bibliographic Search

7.3. Duplicates

7.4. Content Search

7.5. My Library

7.6. Display Options

7.6.1. Full Book View

7.6.2. Limited Preview

7.6.3. Snippet View

7.6.4. No Preview Available

7.6.5. Word Cloud of Keywords Extracted from the Book

7.6.6. Display of Places Mentioned in the Book

7.6.7. Visualizing the Location of Searched Words in the Book

7.7. Downloading E-books

7.8. Access to Physical Documents

7.8.1. Buying the Printed Book from a Bookstore

7.8.2. Finding the Book in a Library

7.9. Blogs About Google Books

7.10. Quality Control

8. The Project Gains Momentum

8.1. One Million Books Digitized at Michigan

8.2. Ever More Agreements with Publishing Houses

8.3. Current and Retrospective Electronic Periodicals

8.3.1. Magazines

8.3.2. Newspapers

8.4. The BnF and Google: Announcements of Summer 2009

8.5. Google Signs Agreement with the Italian State

9. The Alliance of Two Giants: Google and OCLC

9.1. Precursors

9.2. OCLC

9.3. A Google Books - OCLC Agreement

10. Controversies

10.1. The Initial Composition of Google Books' Collections

10.2. The Legal Controversy

10.2.1. Google's Legal Approach: "Opt-In/Opt-Out"

10.2.2. Fair Use (fair use)

10.2.3. Lawsuits in the United States

10.2.4. Lawsuits in France

10.2.5. Positions in Europe

10.3. The Commercial Controversy

10.3.1. Commercial Promotion of Printed Books

10.3.2. Google as Bookseller: Printed Books

10.3.3. Google as Bookseller: E-books

10.3.4. Google as Publisher

10.4. The Cultural Controversy

10.4.1. The Reactions of Jean-Noël Jeanneney (2005, 2009)

10.4.2. The Reaction of Robert Darnton (2009)

10.4.3. Privacy, Marketing, Censorship, and Self-Censorship

10.5. Monopoly or Dominant Position?

10.6. The First Losers: Distributors and Booksellers

11. The Future of Digital Libraries

11.1. Is Google Books a (Digital) Library?

11.2. Does Google Books Rely on an Effective Catalog?

11.3. Balkanization and Redundancy of Digital Resources

11.4. The Limits of OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

11.5. Which Competitors? What Alternatives?

11.5.1. The Brief Life of a Competitor: Microsoft Live Book Search

11.5.2. The Text Component of the Internet Archive

11.5.3. A Cooperative Framework: The Open Content Alliance

11.5.4. The Arrival of a Giant: HathiTrust

11.5.5. A Pioneer: Gallica

11.5.6. A Collective Response: Europeana

11.5.7. Niche Achievements

12. Google Books: Angel and Demon

12.1. Transitioning to an Industrial Scale

12.2. Search Engine Research

12.3. Strengths and Weaknesses of the Tool

12.4. Cowboy Methods

12.4.1. Copyright

12.4.2. Unequal Contracts with Libraries

12.5. No Alternative to Google Books?

12.6. Ideally Positioned for the E-book Market

12.7. The Gradual Integration of the Information Society

12.8. Is Dialogue with Google Possible?

12.9. From Cultural Utopia to Industrial Monopoly

13. Bibliographies

13.1. General Bibliography

13.2. Press Articles in French

13.3. Bibliographies by Charles W. Bailey

13.3.1. General Bibliography on Google Book Search

13.3.2. The Initial Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography

13.4. Bibliography Compiled by OCLC on Mass Digitization

13.5. Video Report on Controversies Surrounding Google Books

13.6. Founding Texts

Alain Jacquesson directed the Geneva School of Librarians from 1977 to 1981. He led the computerization of the University of Geneva libraries from 1981 to 1988 and served as director of the municipal libraries of the City of Geneva from 1988 to 1993. He concluded his career at the Library of Geneva, which he directed from 1993 to 2007. He is the author of numerous publications, including two previous volumes in the "Bibliothèques" series. He teaches at the Geneva School of Business Administration (HEG), in the Information and Documentation department.

Alain Jacquesson's study offers a comprehensive look at the genesis and industrial scale of Google Books, placing the massive undertaking within the broader tradition of library science and documentation techniques. By detailing the practical mechanics of mass digitization—such as optical character recognition, digital imaging, and specialized workflow organization—the work clarifies how millions of volumes from major academic institutions were processed. It situates the project at the intersection of cultural heritage and corporate enterprise, charting the rapid expansion from early university partnerships to large-scale international agreements.

Beyond technical achievements, the book provides a balanced examination of the fierce debates surrounding copyright law, fair use, and the potential monopoly of cultural property by a private corporation. It engages with prominent critiques from cultural figures and outlines various public and cooperative alternatives, including European digital initiatives and collective platforms. This volume will prove especially useful for information professionals, researchers, historians, and students navigating the complex legal, commercial, and ethical dimensions of the modern digital information society.

The book can be browsed on the publisher's website.

A review of this book is available on nonfiction.fr.