Susan Wojcicki, best-known as the head of YouTube, but who also played a key role in convincing the book world to allow Google to scan books into its search engine, died August 9 from lung cancer. She was 56.
Wojcicki was friends with Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and rented her garage to the two men as they began building their search engine in 1998. She left a job at Intel in 1999 to join Google as its first marketing manager. She was Google employee #16. It was as director, product management for Google Print that Wojcicki became well-know in a number of publishing circle as she helped manage the rollout of Google’s effort to scan millions of book pages into its databases.
After a year of testing, Google Print went live in 2004 and Page and Brin appeared at that year’s Frankfurt Book Fair to sign up more publishers. In an interview with PW, Wojcicki addressed publishers' copyright concerns by explaining that after a book has been scanned, Google users can can only browse two pages backward and forward from any page where their search term appeared. "Lots of limits are in place," to guard against illegal copying, Wojcicki assured. Including books in Google's search service "is the logical next step" in adding more offline material to its database, Wojcicki said.
Two months after the Google Print rollout, Wojcicki was front and center again to explain the details and ease copyright concerns of Google’s agreement to scan the book collections of the universities of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford libraries plus the New York Public Library. Scanning will be done on-site of each library and Google will work with the libraries to provide them with copies of all files, Wojcicki explained.
Google users whose queries feature a search term from books scanned from the libraries received a brief excerpt and links to where the book can be bought, Google added a button that shows the closest library to the user where the book may be available. In addition, Wojcicki said how much of a book will appear on Google depends on its copyright status. The full text of public domain works was made fully browsable, but for books that are under copyright, only bibliographic information and what Wojcicki descried as a "snippet" of the book would be shown.
Google Print would eventually become Google Books and the entire Google scanning project became a hotly contested copyright fight between Google and authors and publishers, in which Google successfully defended the use of scanning library books and displaying snippets of scanned works for indexing.
While Google Books would occupy the publishing world's attention for years, Wojcicki moved on in her career. She led the company's online advertising business and original video service before being named CEO of YouTube (which Google had bought at her urging) in 2014. She stepped down in February 2023.
