Early next week a district court in New York will decide whether a class-action settlement that would allow Google to continue digitizing millions of old books violates federal antitrust legislation. But only a small portion of the general public is likely to understand the significance of the ruling, even though for the last four years the issues at the heart of the Google Books settlement have been hotly and widely debated by a small group of authors and publishers.

In the world at large, the proposed settlement has been either ignored, or misunderstood. Even those familiar with US copyright law, and the difficulties of digitizing “orphan” books – those whose  rights holders are unknown – may fail to grasp the full meaning of the decision. As a columnist in the San Jose Mercury News has written: “So far, the Google settlement is being treated as if it were just another private litigation. It’s not. Google’s digitized library represents a huge worldwide public policy issue with complex, significant impacts that need further exploration.”

The digitization of the world’s books is a Utopian project. In the US research libraries alone there are more than 540 million volumes, to which another three hundred thousand are added each year. Given these numbers, Google’s efforts to scan 15 million books look relatively modest. Even so, its digitization of rare and out-of-print books at five of the world’s leading libraries is unprecedented. Already the Google initiative has made available miles of books that have languished in the world’s library stacks for centuries, and it has realistically opened up the prospect of a modern day Library of Alexandria,  available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.

The dream of collecting knowledge has always been part of Google’s vision. Its official website explains that “[our] name reflects the immense volume of information that exists, and the scope of Google’s mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That sounds grandiose but Google deserves full credit for what it has already accomplished. In five years it has scanned more than 7 million books, granting a literary resurrection to long-forgotten histories, novels, encyclopedias and journals. Nobody questions the cultural value of any of this, but many people who have followed the initiative have come to doubt whether any for-profit entity should have the right to a competitive advantage in the world of digital literature, especially when this advantage is secured through the acquisition of material that ought to belong to everyone.

One strong argument in Google’s favour stems from increasing evidence that many of our most valued cultural assets are decaying at a terrifying rate. Nobody who has ever glimpsed the tattered national archives in Guyana will doubt the urgent need to preserve material before it degrades irretrievably. Furthermore, the decay of printed matter is only a small piece of the general problem. As Professor Lawrence Lessig and others have argued, over-zealous copyright protection has significantly retarded the conservation of film and audio recordings in the last few decades, often with disastrous consequences. To date, about 80 percent of all silent films have been lost to natural decay as well as 50 percent of the films made before World War II. Many could have been saved if the law permitted a more relaxed attitude to the duplication of material that may soon become defunct.

Books, however, are far more durable than most people believe. A few years ago the novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a powerful expose of the pseudo-scientific purging of old books from America’s libraries, often on the basis of ridiculous tests — such as double-folding paper to see whether it broke – which gauged how well the paper had aged. Baker pointed out that priceless archives of America’s newspapers were also being discarded at the whim of librarians who had no idea of their value, and being replaced with low-grade substitutes like microfilm and digitization.

Technology has improved since Baker wrote his paean to old books, but his argument is still relevant. No amount of digitization can ever replace the texture, smell and physical appeal of a real book. In later life, the English novelist John Fowles made a point of reading books in their first editions, simply because they carried over so much more of their original culture than any copy could. Today, anyone lucky enough to glimpse a copy of the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays,  or an early edition of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary will realize immediately that digital copies will never come close to capturing the essential properties of an actual book. But for millions of people who have no chance of ever seeing documents like these in their original form, digital scans are a valuable alternative.

What Google has yet to settle, definitively, is the question of who should be placed in charge of the preservation of our cultural memories, and on what basis they should proceed. Without a profit motive, can perishable historical artifacts – like the records of slave ships and indentureship contracts which are currently rotting in library archives throughout Caribbean – be saved before it is too late?  What about the newspapers, novels or literary magazines which are gathering dust and bookworms in our attics? What about the private correspondence of earlier generations which we dismiss today but may well turn out to be invaluable to future historians?

If Google, and companies like it, are prepared to invest the money and manpower necessary to gather portions of our collective memory which are currently decaying and inaccessible, why shouldn’t they be rewarded with a competitive and potentially lucrative advantage? The current settlement proposes to create a registry of books printed after 1923 – the year to which current copyright law extends – and to generously compensate the owners and rights holders of these works for any revenue which the company derives from them. That seems quite reasonable to most people who do not have a professional investment in publishing.

As for the question of whether the proposed settlement is anti-competitive, Sergey Brin, one of Google’s founders, memorably argued in a recent New York Times editorial that “nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.”

Of course larger questions beckon down the road. What will happen to its vast databases if Google changes ownership, or goes out of business? How well will digital databases age? Can a group of publishers and a private company reasonably set the legal precedents that will constrain all subsequent efforts to preserve culture digitally? All of these issues need to be debated outside of the context of the immediate trial. But answers cannot be postponed indefinitely. If we fail to act soon, millions of other books, films and recordings will disappear forever, while the lawyers keep fussing over the fine print. Anyone with an interest in conserving historical archives or literary culture ought to take note of the upcoming developments in the Google books settlement, and to reach their own conclusions about what is the best way to preserve our own crumbling cultural patrimony before it is too late.