Google's Fingers Revealed!

 Like just about everyone else,  as an author and as a reader,  I have been curious about Google’s much discussed library of scanned books.  The Author’s Guild newsletter keeps me informed but I’m still not sure if I should hope for new future royalties on past books or instead look at the  benefits of instant access to scanned books when I write new ones.

So when the Google Book Reader showed up among the apps offered on my still relatively new iPhone I tried it out. And I learned some surprising things.

          One of the sample texts on Book Reader was a Joseph Conrad novella, The Shadow Line.  I  read it while stranded in  an airport waiting room, with the happy realization that if it worked, this system would provide a handy source of emergency reading material.

          The Conrad novella put me in mind of another Conrad work,  Under Western Eyes, the 1911 novel about terrorism that had come up in a recent news story. I’m a fan of Conrad’s Secret Agent, whose agent provocateur theme seems relevant today, so I made a mental note to read Under Western Eyes.  I searched the free books list on Book Reader and there it was—in the public domain.  I could try it for free. 

          I found reading the scanned books on the iPhone quite satisfactory.  The type was clear and it was easy to drag the words down the screen with my thumb.  It beat Kindle and the Sony reader with its irritating page refresh flicker. 

But occasionally there were stutters, so to speak, in the scanning process.   An earlier reader’s notes and underlining in the copy of Conrad being scanned confused it.   Even bits of grit or loose paper appeared to throw off the character recognition software.  Words would get random #s or &s in them. French phrases in the English would confuse the device so it threw in asterisks and tildes and brevets.  Every now and then it would give up completely and erupt in string of dingbats like comic book cursing.  A couple of underlined sentences were suddenly reproduced photographically, in the original type, not the screen type.   Then it would angrily hit the virtual carriage return a few times, producing a three quarter  inch blank space. 

          My scanner doesn’t work to well, either, but I was surprised that Google, that tech giant, did not have better ones.

 And I was really surprised by what happened next: like a dirty photo falling from between the pages of a book a photo popped up.  Right beside my fingers on the screen was an image of other fingers---those of the person who had fed the pages.   The foreigner wore a single  finger latex glove---a finger condom, I would have to call it—a bright pink lilac thing.  The level of care of the person’s nails was nothing to brag about.  I say person, but I think “man” because of the lack of manicure attention.

 Was it the condom that made the picture seem obscene and pornographic?  The suddenness of its appearance suggested scanning as an unclean process; I thought with horror of the guy who found a finger in his bowl of fast food chili.

          So this was the literal hand of the powerful Google?  The fickle fingers of the Google that holds my copyright fate in the balance?

What did such sloppiness say about how much we can trust Google or how much we should fear it? Trust Google to make decent copies of  the books they are scanning, to begin with, because as we debate the real issues of rights versus access,  most of us, I believe,  took for granted the books would be perfectly rendered. 

But the scanning errors I found made the text corrupt.   In addition to the mangled lines, I have no idea how many lines or even pages could have been left out completely.  The novel has a Russian setting and some of what I took to be transliterated terms of Russian might simply have been scanner artifacts.

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