As Spiderman taught us, with great power comes great responsibility. They’ve showed us so far that they are capable of being responsible. And on occasion, careless as well (such as when they had some street-level photos of a military base on Google Earth a while back).

Thus far, though, there is definitely a lot of great things that can be said about them. After all, not many others are so willing to protect the privacy of their users to deny requests from the federal government to provide information about their users — the big companies sure have come a long way from the McCarthy era when even the unlikely started handing over lists of suspected communists over to the government to keep themselves safe.

And they’ve achieved a lot more in their short term in furthering free and open source than Linux and the like has done in their much longer history.

As with anything, it’s a wait and see. Will they become the next Microsoft? Doubtful. I see them going more in the direction of Apple so far.

My biggest problem so far with Google Books is that many of the books have been rather poor-quality scans, almost completely illegible in some cases. I don’t believe that’s always the fault of the source material. In most of those cases they were the fault of the people scanning them not taking the time to do the best scans possible. But, that’s not really too different from the control of YouTube and the like.

Google is probably doing one of the best things that we could ever possibly do for books, much better than Amazon could ever possibly do. Now, what would be even better is if Amazon partnered with Google enough that we can use the Google book formats on the Kindle — but, considering that we have difficulties doing this with Amazon’s own digital editions and Mobipocket, I don’t see this kind of compatibility coming any time soon.

Will this be profitable? The real answer is, who cares? As I said, this is the best thing to happen to books since eBooks started. Nobody really will be hurt out of any of this. If any OOP books makes one sale, I’m sure that’s the first dime that the book has made in years.

As long as court fees don’t continue, this will be a largely no-cost venture. The two major areas where they will even need to put money in:

* Server costs — something they already have. Need extra hard drive space for all the added virtual shelf space that will be required? The price is a small drop in the bucket, especially with constantly lowering prices of hard drives.

* Digitizers — which can theoretically come from many places. They can pay their own people, they can accept through volunteers (which might be the only way for many rare books), or the publishers/authors can supply. Basically, low cost again if they can rely on the volunteer and direct-from-publisher base. They already rely on volunteers for many of the free books that are up currently, just as Project Gutenberg does.

Here’s the thing: Google is all about the spreading of information to the masses. Google is a big supporter of the free culture and the open source.

I have a lot of respect for Google and the things that it does. It still boggles the mind how a website with nothing but a logo, a text box, and a couple of buttons can even get to where it has come today. I may not be getting a Google phone and such, but their innovations have truly become the path of where we should be going. As they said in their Google Chrome comic book, they hope that they can at least build a model for their competitors to follow.

Google definitely knows what they’re doing. They’ve proved that they can reinvent what a big money maker is by making a business based on a simple text box, they’ve reinvented the way that the web browser should work, they’ve reinvented corporate culture by creating an environment that their employees want to be in — one that enhances and encourages free thinking and new ideas (the only other big companies that can be even remotely compared to the Googleplex environment? Pixar and the old Disney studios).

The best thing that has ever come about out of the Internet is the availability of long-forgotten and unavailable material. Google is doing something that I’ve been wanting to happen for years: give the masses access to the information and content that has been restricted to collectors and librarians for years. We shouldn’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a rare book just for the information within.

This isn’t going to hurt the collectors market. Collectors always understand that a first edition of Huckleberry Finn is worth a lot more than the dollar store edition.

This may even cause more people to be interested in collecting rare books, even if only just to contribute to Google.

What we need now is for this to spread throughout the other forms of media. There are thousands of hours of movie footage, television footage, audio recordings, etc. that are a largely untapped market, yet still could become profitable. Much of this has already been digitized to protect these from being lost forever. Why are they merely sitting on hard drives where nobody can see them? Transferring them to a hard drive space and setting up ways for people to access all of this forgotten content is a largely low-cost venture. Hopefully books are only Google’s beginnings for giving us rarities.

Thankfully, there has been some minor work in getting long out of print material to the masses. Search around iTunes long enough and you’ll start finding plenty of albums that haven’t seen a release in many, many years.

So, good luck, Google. Hope you succeed again.