Writing in The Times (London) today, former editor William Rees-Mogg claims that Google is endangering his academic publishing company by its rapacious tactic of scanning any books it pleases and publishing them online.

Google has an agreement with a handful of major libraries to scan their whole collections. Among them are Harvard and Stanford, plus two British copyright libraries, the British Library and the Bodleian at Oxford, which receive copies of all UK-published books free by law.

Rees-Mogg’s ancient publishing imprint, Pickering & Chatto, subsidizes the five copyright libraries “by about £45,000 [$75,000] a year in free books, a significant cost for a small publisher.”

He makes the crucial point that, “the British Library does not acquire the copyright as well as the free books.”

Obviously Google has every right to republish books that are out of copyright. The question concerns books that are still in copyright and will remain so for 70 years or more. If Google can scan these books, without the permission of the publisher, and include them in its database, then most libraries will not need to buy them. And if librarians do not buy them, they cannot be published. The whole world of learning will be damaged, and academic publishing will cease to be a viable business.

A questionmark also arises over the archival longevity of electronic information. Pickering & Chatto targets its titles at the archival market. “They are stitched, on acid-free paper, with durable cloth bindings. They will last for centuries. Electronic systems of storage have no such archival reliability.”

Rees-Mogg accepts the need for ebooks : “There is no problem about producing electronic books for those who prefer them; indeed, some of our books are published in electronic form. The problem is essentially one of copyright and its attendant revenue consequences. Can Google scan and extract books that are still in copyright without payment to the copyright owner?”

And there lies the crux of the matter. Google is an electronic publisher and obsessive collector of the world’s knowledge. By creating an engine that can search and deliver that content with accuracy, it has won a deserved reputation as a benefactor of mankind. That it makes a great deal of money by hanging its advertising contextually around the edges of that information, and even pays publishers for doing so, is widely seen as fair dealing.

Of course, online copyright issues are by no means settled, and Google has taken the robust attitude that it will continue on its course until these matters are cleared up and tested in court. The break in Google’s logic is that with print books it’s dealing in a field of settled copyright law. Muscling in and scanning the work of others into its online publishing format is a gigantic act of piracy against authors and publishers.

William Rees-Mogg comments : “Academic publishing is an essential part of the chain of higher education. Together with a relatively small number of similar publishers of edited texts and scholarly monographs, of which outside the sciences the major university presses are the largest, we provide the opportunity for advances in scholarship to be published. This is not a bookshop market. It is largely a postgraduate library market, which means it is quite small.”

He finishes his piece : “I am an interested party, at the interface between university authors and university libraries. So far as I am concerned, Google must accept the rights in intellectual property. The survival of the book depends on that.”

Google should understand that when it steps outside the bounds of its specialist field, it must play by the rules, or it endangers its hard-won reputation as one of the good guys.