One of the perpetrators of the deal known by crowing Author’s Guild executives as the Google / Author’s Guild agreement — and known by crowing members of the Association of American Publishers as the Google / AAP agreement — has come forth in a New York Times op-ed column and admitted being part of the “secret negotiations” behind the settlement. Sounding more than a tad defensive, author and Author’s Guild board member James Gleick declares the deal is “a shining moment for this ancient technology” of the book … although he admits “Publishers may or may not figure out how to make money again.” He doesn’t get into who, exactly, will then make the books that Google is going to post should publishers, you know, not “figure that out” and therefore, uh, croak — like almost all commentators on the deal so far, Gleick overlooks the fact that for books to get on Google they will still have to exist (i.e., be made) before they can be scanned, or that likewise if they go direct to digital they will still need to be produced in the old fashioned way: edited, copy-edited, designed, laid out, and proofed, if not printed. So writers will be screwed, too, if publishers go under.

But never mind that. He goes on to say that the “product” of the book now has “has a chance for new life: … as an idea, and as a set of literary forms.” There’s no consideration of the fact that, actually, the implications for long-form intellectualism are dire in an age of complete-digitalization. (Consider reading War and Peace on your iPhone.) Nor is there any seeming awareness, let alone discussion, of the better implications for “form” under discussion in the indy publishing and art-making community (see the MobyLives entry iNovel, uNovel, weNovel below). Nor is there any discussion/awareness of how some big publishers may be up to something better — no consideration, for example, of the better implications for authors of the massive digitalization of its backlist underway at Random House. Instead, Gleick discusses the way the Google deal brings “back to commercial life” books that had only “existed at libraries,” without mentioning that, well, authors were paid for those books, too, and at better rates than Google will pay them. And really? A book is somehow more “alive” in the ethernet than in a used bookstore or as print-on-demand from a publisher — or in a library? And of course there’s no discussion either of one of the deal’s most important aspects: that those public libraries are being taken away from the public and given over to a private company, something that will have a huge impact on not just our culture but our democracy.

It’s a complicated discussion, or should be, but instead here it feels like a Judy Miller/Michael Gordon extravaganza prosecuting oh-so-simplistically the case of darker forces: We shouldn’t get too “sentimental” about the object, says Gleick, before signing off with the advice to publishers that, er, they should “Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.”

Beyond the treacle, it’s the kind of unaware self-contradiction the Google defenses have been rife with, so far — it is, in short, another “discussion” of the deal from an AAP or Author’s Guild member that betrays its membership to embrace the Reagan-era dictum that unions can’t question capital, and therefore must ignore completely any discussion of the socio-economic implications of the agreement, much less that it’s an avoidable calamity for our culture.

It’s a “discussion” that’s completely barren of the kind of imagination it insists will persist, but is actually likely to threaten — the creative imagination, say, to concieve a novel about a futuristic dystopia where the all-controlling Google servers go down ….