Openness creates value, enclosure captures it. The innate tendency of proprietary platforms and for-profit players is to enclose and privatize, to create silo’s of information which go against a truly open internet of content.

In an interesting editorial, Tim O’Reilly is pointing out that the internet majors are following in the footsteps of the financial world, who are trading more for their own account, rather than being just brokers for their clients, creating all kind of conflicts of interest, as they can, and do, trade against their own customers.

This is also happening in the area of the Book Commons, and particularly in the area of the digital scanning of books, where there are now dozens of uncommunicating silos. As Tim O’Reilly again explains: Google, Microsoft, Amazon and the Open Content Alliance each have their own scanning projects, they are not commonly searchable, and neither are the various publisher depositories.

Here therefore proposes a set of demands for a truly open Book Commons:

“Having various book search engines competing to build a proprietary online book repository seems silly to me.

Three things ought to happen to speed up the development of the book search ecosystem:

1. Book search engines ought to search publishers’ content repositories, rather than trying to create their own repository for works that are already in electronic format. Search engines should be switchboards, not repositories.

2. Publishers need to stop pretending that “opt in” will capture more than a tiny fraction of the available works. (I estimated that only 4% of books every published are being commercially exploited.)

3. Book search engines that are scanning out of print works in order to create a search index ought to open their archives to their competitors’ crawlers, so readers can enjoy a single integrated book search experience. (Don’t fight the internet!)