Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's Book Search Hits a Snag
The Importance of writes "Yesterday, Slashdot readers discussed Amazon's brand new, technically impressive and highly useful book search feature that lets users search the full text of over 120,000 books. Today, the Authors Guild is saying that the publishers don't have the right to let Amazon do this. Uh oh."
publishers don't have the right to let Amazon do this
I can understand publishers not letting Amazon do this, but not having the right to let them do it? This is absurd...
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
I understand the technical reasons for this... but there is no practical reason, since it would probably be very hard to read a book this way.
Esoteric reference.
Publishers don't have to _let_ Amazon do this. Amazon can do this without anybody's permission - they're not making content available to the public, merely letting the public find the right product to then buy. From my understanding, no content is being sold, or made available, outside of book form. Author should be shouting for friggin' JOY at this. Ugh.
How can Amazon not have the right to do this? I mean, EBSCOhost has the right to let you search MILLIONS of articles, books, and etc. What makes them any different than Aamazon?
~Just keep eating, porky. Fat people are harder to kidnap.
You want to search a book's text? That means the developers and the server would need to have the digital text of the book to parse for the engine.
That's one security fuckup away from free ebooks for everybody.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
If publishers do not have the right to allow Amazon to do this, what about O'Reilly's Safari? This allows subscribers to search the text in all the books in the system not just those on the user's bookshelf.
When I first read this, I thought, why on earth wouldn't they want this? Wouldn't it help sales?
After reading the article, it seems they have a point. Novels wouldn't really be hurt by it (and may actually be helped), but think about reference books and other things. All one would have to do is search for what they're looking for, then pull it right out of the result they're given. Although why they would go to Amazon instead of Google to find that information is beyond me.
Still, I'm not one to condone killing a technology just because it CAN be used for something bad. Plus, it looks like Amazon will take a book off the list if the author insists, so there really isn't too much of a problem here.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Heh, just as I suspected.. I knew some idiots like them would complain sooner or later... or in two days.
"Amazon can do this without anybody's permission - they're not making content available to the public..."
Exactly what do you call the text from a book? If the pages/text aren't its content, then I guess it doesn't have any. So much for literature.
"...merely letting the public find the right product to then buy"
Consider the ramifications of your statement: I should be able to make tracks from a CD available for free, so that others can determine whether they want to buy it. Whether you think that's the way it "should" be or not, it's clearly not legal.
"From my understanding, no content is being sold, or made available, outside of book form."
Once again, I ask you what the content of a book is, if not the pages or text.
GL
Remember when CDs were in their own tornado in the mid 1980's and artists sued the labels saying the labels didn't have the right to republish? Artists of past recordings had to be bought off, and new contracts were ... less ambiguous. I expect the same thing to happen with the online book searching.
by searching *, and the "search" mechnanism would dump the whole book, damn you Author's Guild!!!
This could go either ways
For Amazon: They "purchase" the books. Fair use allows cutting snippets out and showing people. They just built a search engine out of snippets.
Against Amazon: They do not have the authorization to give out whole books, whether in snippets or not. Fair use does not allow complete articles of published material
My opinion: I really dont know. I'd prefer more freedom when it comes to published material, but it's a fair request/statement the authors guild says. It's not like they demand you read the books/magazines with 499$ book "translators", and books are reasonablly priced. Combine that with really big and good used book sellers.
Other books at especially high risk include those that sell to the student (particularly college student) market as secondary reading. A student could easily grab the relevant chapter or two out of a book without paying for it.
This whole thing just ain't right, as of yet. If you read the article, you can see that on the one hand, people have figured out how to get 108 pages out of a bestseller (that's unfair to the authors and publishers), and on the other hand, those same authors and publishers are expecting students to purchase entire books just to get the one or two chapters their teacher has directed them to read. Like the new music services, there should be a legal, reasonably priced (oh, boy) way to obtain those two chapters rather than having to purchase the entire book. As for the 108 pages, I am guessing they pulled that out of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, yet another doorstop from this prolific author. As someone who has done a fair amount of writing and someone who has done a LOT of reading, I am sympathetic to both sides in this one. Looks to me like Amazon needs to try again.
In principio erat Verbum.
books with short, simple sections would be a particular problem. A book of Poetry, or cookbook (as mentioned by article), or even technical documentation, if i only need documentation on a small part(s) of a machine, even code samples would be left freely availible by this feature. But for the vast majority of reading (ie full books), it is nothing more than a nice feature for smaller title to be in the public's eye so to speak.
As far as publishers are concerned they think they are God.
Here's how the publishing world works: Publishers don't actually create anything. Due to today's technology they don't even provide a needed service. But publishers think they own, and created, every piece of thought in the world and that without them we would all be in the dark ages still. They also put on a good show pretending that they are out to protect the rights and income of the material's real creators.
But its all bullsh*t. Just look at our favorite publishers the RIAA and MPAA. What is the author's guild going to do? Litigation? Publishers have all the money and until we change society enough so that we no longer tley on third party publishers they will continue to win all of the court battles brought against them.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
The article makes a good point: if my classmates and I can xerox together an entire textbook from Amazon printouts for $15 or $20 rather than each of us paying $160 for a copy of this doorstop, you can bet I'll be the first in line. Paper is cheap.
In 80% of the college classes I've ever had, the prof makes you buy some crappy book he wrote, not because there isn't something better out there, but because he gets royalties on every copy he sells. And $160 I don't spend on textbooks is $160 I can spend on chicks, beer, and pizza... I don't need any more justification than that.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
"w3 pwn j00!!!!11!"
How many novels have you read that you liked, and would purchase to read again if only you could remember what the title was, and all you know are a few choice quotes or unique scenes?
OTOH, the article raises a valuable point about books like cookbooks, which are just collections of small bits of information, and the simple act of returning a page obviates the need to buy the book in the first place.
It seems to me the authors, publishers, and vendors need to coordinate their efforts and produce satisfactory solutions; for instance, allowing cookbooks to be searched for things like ingredients or recipe names but only returning the recipe names and the books that have them.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
lthough why they would go to Amazon instead of Google to find that information is beyond me.
The amount of usefull information in the world available to people on the internet, compared to whats available though, say, inter-library loan is actualy pretty small. Unless you're talking about a subject like Computer Sciance, or programming.
I mean, try to find a lot of relavent information on the history of Taiwanese Americans (for example). I had to actualy get up off my ass and to the library in order to write a paper about 'em.
Anything else non-technical, or, god forbid, written before the 90's is more in books then it is online.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Some of the examples given would seem to have little effect on the sales of books. If someone was only going to print out a specific recipe in a cookbook, or a couple of pages in a guidebook, they probably weren't amazingly inclined to get the book anyway.
But near the end of the email Authors Guild rep says, " A student could easily grab the relevant chapter or two out of a book without paying for it. Students certainly have the time and most likely the inclination to do so, and, with the help of some willing colleagues, could print out the entire texts of books in the program."
As a college student, especially in light of the
recent NYT article on textbooks being found half-price or less overseas, it's not unreasonable to think a group of students might get together and pay $15 or $20 to print a couple hundred pages of textbook in the library.
And if someone wrote some nefarious program to log into Amazon as multiple fake accounts to access an entire textbook and download it, everyone would use it. I can easily see textbook-printing rings, with get-togethers at the library to print and distribute free books. Hell, I'd be the first one in line. Paying $500 for a semester of books is rediculous.
So, while I think the reaction of the Authors Guild is a little bit overboard, the email does rasie some valid points.
The email also mentions, in passing, that, "[m]ost fiction titles are not likely to be greatly threatened." It would seem then, that maybe the type of book shold control how many pages you can access. For textbooks or cookbooks or guidebooks or the other topics the Authors Guild fears will be threatened, maybe a compromise could be reached so that only one or two consecutive pages could be accessed. Then, for fiction or books where it is less likely a user would only want a very small portion of the book (and be willing to use Amazon to avoid buying it), more could be accessed.
This would seem to both help address the concerns raised in the email, and allow Amazon to offer this service.
-Trillian
...how the hell do you turn it off!!! I did a search for "Dark Sword" and got over 32,000 results :(
From the website:
Books participating in our Search Inside the Book feature with "rocket experiments" in their text will show an excerpt with your search term highlighted.
Okay, that means that any publishing company leary about having a txt version of the book leaked on the internet can at least opt out of this feature.
Still, it seems to me that the database server is going to have access to a lot of information about the books' texts. And the more useful the engine aspires to be, the more likely it is that it won't want to limit itself to simple word lists. Take into consideration how useful google's excerpts are in determining what sort of page you're looking for.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
If the writer thinks this would help sales then let them opt in. As the article points out there are a lot of good reasons to not allow this.
Imagine....thousands of authors being busted for plagiarism because of Amazon's search feature.
What a nightmare it must be for those that built up lucrative careers and solid reputations on the backs of others--they're hoping they can hide behind the lawyers.
Seems to me that this is the electronic equivalent of standing in the aisle at Borders and reading through a book. I agree with previous commetns that if somebody is looking for a particular bit of info, they will most likely search via Google or Yahoo. If they search on Amazon, I'd bet that there is a good chance that they are browsing for the book in order to purchase it.
As far as the comment about college students getting textbooks this way: guess what? If the professor knows it will get light use, chances are that the prof. will put the book on reserve in the library and the copiers will get a workout when the material is referenced.
Same point is for any book, really. If it can be found in your public library, the pertinent parts can be copied. I have yet to see a public library that didn't have a bank of copy machines.
Corporations (*AA, book publishers, authors, etc) need to take ADVANTAGE of the Electronic Age, not fight it. Money redirected from litigation towards innovation (products) and content (music, books) would make us all better.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I believe SCO is in infringement of Amazon's IP.
hey!
From the article:
When we learned of the program, we thought that it would be impossible to read more than 5 consecutive pages from a book in the program. It turns out that it's quite simple (though a bit inconvenient) to look at 100 or more consecutive pages from a single lengthy book. We've even printed out 108 consecutive pages from a bestselling book. It's not something one would care to do frequently, but it can be done.
The time is really funny, because Slashdot (and many major news outlets) were reporting the demise of the e-book not a few weeks ago. Now, we have new e-books in the form of Amazon's text search.
I used to work for a start-up publishing company that morphed into an internet company. I happened to be the marketing director in charge of print book sales. One day, the CEO decided that it would be a great idea to offer the full text of all our books online for free! Since our target market was largely cash-starved students, this move worried me greatly. Obviously, our sales were goin to drop off tremendously (maybe to zero?).
I discussed my concerns with the CEO. He made a very interesting point: For someone to print out the entire 200 - 500 pages of one of our titles would cost more in toner, paper and time than the $35 the customer would otherwise pay. This seemed to make sense at the time, but in retrospect it is kinda BS because most printers have double-sided multi-page-on-one-sheet capabilities that collapse toner/paper costs.
In the end, we didn't see sales drop off that much. Customers still wanted to order old-fashioned books. Most didn't have the time/patience to print out the books from the internet, didn't have the technical knowledge to do so (hard to believe, but we're talking about MBAs here), or (most likely) it didn't even occur to them.
People who were likely to print out the whole books online were probably also the ones borrowing copies from friends, photocopying from the library, buying used copies, etc. etc.
All, that said, I have to side with the Authors Guild. In the case I described above, our web site was relatively unknown whereas Amazon is among the top end-destinations on the Internet. Book counterfeiters are one perl-script away from obtaining the full-text of the latest Harry Potter book and printing up their own illicit copies for street sale. Yeah, there are already fake copies of bestsellers floating around out there, but now making them will become that much easier.
Comparisons to Napster and pirated music are obvious - however, unlike musicians, authors can't really draw income from "concert tours" as recording artists do. Authors live almost exclusively off royalty checks (with the exception of those lucky enough to pen books that can be cross-merchandised, made into movies, etc.)
Still, I was skeptical that Amazon's text-search system delivered the advertised goods. Getting all those publishers to hand over their text - their lifeblood - is a monumental task in itself. But I guess the system does work after all - too well, in fact!
For example, recipes are traditionally not protected by copyright, so cookbooks would seem to receive less protection. On the other hand, the effect of the search function would possibly have a greater impact on the sale of cookbooks than other types of books.
So let me get this straight. If recipes aren't protected by copyright...and the problem lies with recipes...there is no problem. Yes?
Your brain is not a computer.
So that it only works for books, or perhaps that items can be plugged with a "searchable" flag which can be disabled for manuals and other non-novel type literature which might lose out on such a search instead of benefitting.
There's a big difference between music and book publishers. The groups the RIAA represents actually owns the copyright on the recordings; the book publishers we're talking about don't own the rights to the books they distribute. Have a look yourself if you don't believe me.
How long have we been hearing about Amazon implementing this? A while now. The "Authors Guild" should have said something a long time ago until waiting after Amazon already implemented the thing. Way to go.
So what's to stop me searching for a phrase that appears on page 1, then going to page 3, finding a phrase there, and then searching for it. Can I just read the entire book, advancing 3 pages at a time?
How are they safeguarding against that kind of abuse?
Sounds kinda like what you use your reference section at the library for. What's wrong with getting a quick quote from a book without buying it? I buy most of the books I use on a consistant basis, but a Ph. D. student is not going to buy every article and monograph they have to research to get a quote from. Just a thought. My point is that libraries are not "bad" and they do the same thing, except you actually have to pick up the book.
Personally, I think this full text search is a great feature, and will only help with sales.
I wonder if there isn't some kind of disconnect between the Authors Guild and the authors that make up the guild.
I don't think most authors want people to be forced to buy their book in order to get at a couple of isolated pages. Most authors want people to buy the book because they like the book, and think it is worth owning a copy.
True reference books are doomed, appropriately, in the age of the internet. I no longer need a paper dictionary when I can use dictionary.com or get access to the OED through my university. But amazon's new feature is not responsible for the fact that definitions and other discrete pieces of factual information are more easily looked up online than on paper.
Everything from cookbooks to novels, whose gestalt quality is made up of more than simply the number of discrete facts they collect, are safe. You only want one page out of my published materials? Fine, take it. Heck, I'll make you a photocopy myself. You think what I have written, as a whole, has some value? Then by all means, buy it.
What's good for the syndicate is good for the country. --Milo Minderbinder
And for anyone who cares enough to try and get the whole book ....
1) Create 5 Amazon accounts
2) Search for your book
3) Search within that book for the author's name (typically on every page) or the book's name (typically on the other page)
4) Start at page 1, switch accounts as necessary
5) PROFIT!!!!
Ever spend some time in Borders and watch people have a cup of coffee while reading travel books, recipe books, medical books and others -- without buying anything. They'd probably like to "borrow" the coffee too.
One employee tells me they get people asking if there is a copier they can use!
Now they can stay home, drink their own coffee and plan their vacation -- printing out the important stuff.
I wonder if it's possible to get the contents of book with this cute search function (without registration). A smart perl script would do I guess. I tried and it *seems* to be possible (although pretty slow, 10 words per call at most)
-- mg
we would like to thank the authors/permissions involved in the development of the pateNTdead eyecon0meter, without which, it would be nearly impossible to find the 'stuff that matters' buried deep within the terabytes of whoreabull ?pr? ?firm? hypenosys.
/.puppets.
.asp on that. when the lights come up, there'll be no going back, & no where to hide.
all in all, most of you are doing a remarkable job of participation in the planet/population rescue effort. there's still much/more to be done.
as you can maybe already see, yOUR survival/success is not the least bit dependent on the gadgets/minphucking devices of the greed/fear based corepirate nazis, & their phonIE ?pr? ?firm? buyassed
consult with/trust in yOUR creator. more breathing. vote with yOUR wallet (somtimes that means not buying anything, a notion previously unmentioned buy the greed/fear/war mongers). seek others of non-aggressive/positive behaviours/intentions. stop wasting anything/being frivolous. that's the spirit.
investigate the newclear power plan. J. Public et AL has yet to become involved in open/honest 'net communications/commerce in a meaningful way. that's mostly due to the MiSinformation suppLIEd buy phonIE ?pr? ?firm?/stock markup FraUD execrable, etc...
truth is, there's no better/more affordable/effective way that we know of, for J. to reach other J.'s &/or their respective markets.
the overbullowned greed/fear based phonIE marketeers are self eliminating by their owned greed/fear/ego based evile MiSintentions. they must deny the existence of the power that is dissolving their ability to continue their self-centered evile behaviours.
as the lights continue to come up, you'll see what we mean. meanwhile, there are plenty of challenges, not the least of which is the planet/population rescue (from the corepirate nazi/walking dead contingent) initiative.
EVERYTHING is going to change, despite the lameNT of the evile wons. you can bet your
we weren't planted here to facilitate/perpetuate the excesses of a handful of Godless felons. you already know that? yOUR ONLY purpose here is to help one another. any other pretense is totally false.
pay attention (to yOUR environment, for example). that's quite affordable, & leads to insights on preserving life as it should/could/will be again. everything's ALL about yOUR motives.
take care, we're here for you.
Most academics chafe at the fact that the publishers maintain such a stranglehold on the content they publish. Trust me, it pisses of Professor X that others who would like to include an article or chapter of his in a course packet have to pay outrageous licensing fees. (This isn't only because he doesn't see a dime from those fees, but also because he believes the free exchange of ideas is crucial to progress--one of the reasons he is publishing in the first place.)
So if amazon's service allows students to get isolated chapters or articles, without paying for them, it will be a boon for academic authors and a setback from academic publishers. Why is it the publishers who are supporting amazon's full text search and the Authors Guild that is crying foul?
The obvious answer is that the AG does not represent academic authors. The real question, then, is: why does the email from AG specifically mention college students and their dark desire to get single chapters without having to pay through the nose for them?
What's good for the syndicate is good for the country. --Milo Minderbinder
As a matter of fact, my University charges me fee, which gives me the right to photocopy anything in the library. Makes it legal and has whole array of academic books, even course textbooks.
RRS, aka The Notorious BOB
www.notoriousbob.co.nr
to provide a wonderful and immensely valuable tool when it "MIGHT" with a "HIGH DEGREE" of time, effort, and money be undermined. Lord knows someone couldn't go to a "UNIVERSITY LIBRARY" and do the same thing.
=P
I understand the concern if people start stealing the whole book but amazon can easily put more constraints on the search. One was would allow an IP address to only view 5 pages of any one book with a given 24 hour period. They already do all kinds of fancy personalization, this would not be hard for them. People copy sections of books all the time, I've paged through books at the bookstore and written down travel info and recipes before. Does that hurt sales? Are they going to shut down travel/cooking web sites because they hurt sales too? This is nothing new. And ask yourself, do libraries hurt book sales? If you really like a book you'll buy it. Its easier then printing out your electronic copy (the binding and cover protect it) and you can take it more places then you e-version (on the bus, plane, train etc). Publishers need to think of new ways to sell content. Why not have a premium amazon search (you pay a little to access 1/2 million books) and you can print out small portions of your needed reference for a small ammount ($2). If it's useful people will pay.
The differnce is that when you browse at the store you can't bring the bits you browsed home with you. You either have to buy the book or put it back.
Sure, you've read it, but your memory is the only "copy" you retain.
It's a sticky wicket really, with no clear answer in the traditional way of looking at these things. Book publishers sell books. Authors sell the contents of the book.
In the world of the printing press these two points of view coincide. In the digital world they do not always, as we see.
Still, for the most part, if I were inclined to copy a book I probably wouldn't use this feature of Amazon. Too troublesome. I'd take the book out of the library and scan the sucker.
My understanding from other posts is that many do this already.
KFG
Or what about Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java? (Why didn't I mention it in my original post? ah well...) For those who don't know, this book is widely regarded as the best introduction to the java programming language. And Eckel offers the book as a complete, free download on his site. Why would he do this?
...I was prepared to have low sales but the book brought people to my web site and to the CD Rom and seminars, so I felt it was worth the risk. Prentice Hall did a low first printing because they were worried about the online book cannibalizing sales. However, this book has done better than all the other books I've written -- for the first time I've gotten royalty checks that have made a difference.
In fact, in his site FAQ, Eckel addresses this question: Why do you put your books on the Web? How can you make any money that way?
He writes:
Note that he mentions seminars - so this case represents an instance of an author that can have "concert tours" that make up for the lost revenue of a free online book.
As an author, I totally repudiate this attempt to act on my behalf. I want my work read. I do not want the 3 cents royalty. For several years in a row, I asked Authors Guild at least to turn over all my royalties to Unicef, instead of sending me a tiny check each year.
In sum, this is a rougue outfit. Scholarly work is a public good.
Would you like some cheese to go with that.....
Oh, never mind....you would think that they really don't want to sell more books and make more money.
I mean, if I wanted to purchase a book for JDBC stuff, I wouldn't get a book with a JDBC section, I'd look for a book on JDBC! Likewise, why would a person who wants fish recipes so badly go through the trouble of fishing through a *single cookbook* for fish recipes and printing 100+ pages of that book using amazon search? Wouldn't it be easier, and more efficient to just search for a fish cookbook?
I mean yeah, people *could* go through all that trouble, but just because someone *can*, it doesn't mean that they *will*.
And, if a person goes through *that much trouble* to get a free recipe... amazon.com/ca would never be able to sell to them anyway if they didn't have the search!
People who search for stuff on amazon WANT BOOKS, not just information. If information was all people wanted, they'd just use google... and get their recipes for free.
I think you also fail to realize the possible piracy implications for all books, novels and otherwise. If a search returns the matching page with two preceding pages and two subsequent pages, it doesn't take a computer scientist to figure out you can recursively use some terms from the far two pages to initiate a new search and get the whole damn book after several iterations.
Now, you might say, it would be silly to go print out books like that in a computer lab at college. But who needs to print them out? I could dump all the text and images into a pdf file and bam, at 200kb a book (text compresses nicely) it's everywhere. With some ad hoc coordination we'll have amazon-ripped bittorrents of entire libraries of fully searchable and indexed pdf books. I've already seen this meticulously hand made from scans. There's no reason they wouldn't take advantage of this to make their pirated ebooks with the click of a mouse.
It's only a matter of time before someone makes an automated tool that will construct a book merely from a few lines of its text that can be entered into Amazon's search. It will recursively get all the text and formatting then distill a PDF file and save it to disk. Hell, you could even make it a web service.
The authors are fully in the right as long as you believe in copyright laws.
If you don't believe, well then I suppse there's the argument you could get any of these books for free by checking them out at your local libarary assuming THEY bought a copy. But I hardly think that's a strong argument in support of what will eventually happen.
It's a little sad considering how Amazon just went into the black this last quarter. This setback could be another Segway.
"This thing fucking sucks!" is the feature's greatest problem; this Author's Guild bitching is flyswatter work in comparison.
Example: I just searched for "Al-Jazari," because I'm looking for a book about little robot-toys. When I searched a couple days ago, the first of two results was a book by Al-Jazari about his little robot-toys. Now, it's result #48 out of 48. Almost everything ranked above it is useless crap, but to find what I wanted, I had to page through all of it, since the results are now so unpredictable (and shitty).
Thanks, Amazon.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
I can just see it now. You go to search for some specific topic and Amazon will return thousands of sponsored results, but not what your're looking for. Yet a simple search on Google or some other online booksellers results in many book hits. Don't belive me? Try going into their music search database. IT SUCKS ASS, and that's giving it some credit! For example have a look for the series "Club Rotation." Yes eventualy you will find hits for it, but after wading though results to the latest Britney Spears or whatever other crap they are trying to see you. Back when CDNOW was a seperate company they kicked ASS!!! Now that they are part of the Amazon collective you can't find crap! Heh... I bet a serch for crap would contain results for some top 40 album.
So what does this have to do with books? Simple, they seem to all use the same search engine. Album searches are rather straight forward, and they can't get that right. What makes them think they can get full text searching right?
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
I'm not sure Amazon could make the scanned content searchable under fair use. Fair use only applies to a small portion of a publication. But searching for a word anywhere in the document basically means the whole publication is used for that service, even if in the end only half a page is displayed. So it might not be fair use to make search available to the public. Now if they allowed you to search for any word in the first paragraph of each of their novels only, that would definitely be fair use.
That first, people really don't want to read books on a computer. Secondly, how does this make Amazon any different from any book retailer. I mean, I can go into Borders and look at a book for an hour to decide if it's the right kind of book for me. I can't really see how this is any different besides the (relative) ease with which a book could be torn up and spit back out as some kind of file. That's the concern here, and frankly I don't see it as something that has the potential to rock the literary world as long as people prefer to have a real paper copy of things.
Though admitedly I do prefer works where the copyright has expired in their online form as certain publishers like to call them a classic put a nice picture on the front and sell it for $14, that's cool the author is dead and your robbing his grave, bastards. That has nothing to do with this however.
And they sure as hell do this right now by using a copy machine in a library. I did it, everyone else I know did, what's the big deal?
For one thing, college books are overpriced, buying required text is no easy matter. Publishers campaign like crazy on campus trying to push every "brand new" pages-swapped-nothing-else-changed 33rd editions of the same crappy quality textbooks to make sure new students cannot borrow books from seniors. Now they state it in public: not only you have to buy new s#it every time, you also have to buy every supplementary reading around. Bastards. Greedy, sleazy bastards, all of them.
Wake me up, please! No, rather wake them up ;-)
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
They show +/- 2 pages from the one the searched phase is on (total of 5 pages).
So if I want to read an entire book for free via Amazon, all I have to do is make a script that automatically searches for a phrase extracted from the next page, wash, rinse, repeat?
(For the record, I think the concept of being able to search book text is a good idea in principle, it adds usefulness.)
Sounds like you have been reading Attrition's Mail Section.
If the college students were going to do that, they could also just buy one copy and scan it in or xerox it for their friends. What's the difference?
It is hard to exaggerate the tremendous value this search function has. Amazon has taken a huge leap foward in providing access to information. Really.
What's the point of providing this kind of access if you still need to pay way too much for content that comes in cumbersome form (DRM, books)?
I hope the authors' guild wins this one. The harder they make it for people to access their content, the easier it will be for truly free content to take over the market.
I haven't read too deeply, but this goes back to a case from a few years ago, New York Times v. Tasini, in which an free lance author sued the Times for republishing his work in electronic form without agreement. It really has nothing to do with Amazon, its an author/publisher issue.
Authors don't always get much benefit from the publication and republication of their works beyond initial advances. Publishers, on the other hand, pull a pretty decent margin on books sold thereafter. The "feature" provides a benefit to the publisher, but not necessarily to the author, depending on his or her particular deal.
I imagine authors are looking to this as an opportunity to renegotiate terms of their publishing agreements -- the vast majority of which are adhesion contracts arising from a "take it or leave" it negotiation for their first and only published book.
The law pretty much is what it is, and the ownership of the electronic publication use rights are what they are. The deal will make commercial sense or it won't, and the facility will be available or not. The general idea is that the free market will make for the fairest arrangement between all these parties and for the benefit of the public. Time will tell.
Most book publication agreements provide the publisher only with very limited rights. I'd bet the Guild has a pretty strong legal position, but again, time will tell.
I'm just waiting for the Authors Guild to send Amazon a document saying either they delete all the software which runs Amazon.com, then return the notarized admission of guilt document back, or they're sued.
Are the people at the Author's Guild complete idiots, or what?
I just ordered 2 books last night that I never would have known about without this feature.
They are going to SELL MORE BOOKS because of this feature. What about this don't they understand?
This space available.
Yes, like that book "The Once and Future King" that Professor X talks about all the time in the movie.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
There's something that already allows people to avoid buying books for concentrated bits of information. I believe it's called Google or something or other.
And wouldn't it be very difficult to search out entire books if you don't already know the content? In any case there are much easier ways to get college text books free. A digital camera and a tripod comes to mind.
I know we've been conditioned by Kazaa, Gnutella, etc. to see these conflicts in a certain context but....
... [a] revision of that collective work" to which the Authors had first contributed.
It seems that this is a question of whether the publishers have the right to give consent for this sort of thing, or whether that right is held by the author.
Authors frequently resell rights to their work, (look at some of the compilations Asimov got published later in his career) and the resale of these works are a major source of income. What Amazon has done is created a slippery slope sort of situation by which authors could lose some of their rights from the resale of their work and thus some of their income. The question is, whose consent is required for Amazon to do this, the publisher or the Author?
This is similar to the case of NYT vs. Tasani mentioned in the article, when freelance authors submitted news articles, and the publishers of those news articles not only published them in the agreed medium, but also submitted them to Lexis Nexis.
The District Court granted the Publishers summary judgment, holding, inter alia, that the Databases reproduced and distributed the Authors' works, in 201(c)'s words, "as part of
Publishers aren't stupid. They obviously agree with Amazon in thinking that this will increase book sales or else they wouldn't have agreed to it.
So this is more about what reproduction rights an author has sold to his publisher rather than whether Amazon's service will increase sales of a particular book.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
it will cause professors to stop skimming off the sale of stupid text books.
Academic freedom my ass... the professors are just being greedy... fuck em.
As I discovered here
And that student would be abusing the system. This is the same argument that was used against Napster. The tool could potentially be used by some people to avoid paying for a copyrighted work, therefore it is bad.
But hey, it's the Author's Guild. It's the little guy fighting the man. So we'll overlook that, right?
At the risk of hyperbole, this is far from trivial. Amazon may have found friction on what has otherwise proved to be a glass pyramid - web based sales. In short, curiosity and tax fraud (that 6% you're _supposed_ to send your home state when you buy out of state) aside, what persistant arguments exist for mail-order sales over brick and mortar sales?
The dot com bomb has put the lie to most theories of effeciency, overhead, convienence and yada ya, but Amazon may be onto a shortcut to India here.
for the sake of argument - let's assume the reasonable. Artist guild will defend the interests of artists by filing a class action suit, but then offer a settlement in which signatory artists are compensated a per character royalty not far from Google's model in which small excerpts are returned free, and click through to larger passages result in royalties. At this point the metaphor is common to MP3 etc in which you can order the whole album or just the pages you need. The ability to order a segment of a referance book will largely increase the market for such works - whereas fiction will benefit from more targeted exposure.
This is a seachange because it presents a persistant argument for buying online - exponentially better information and pay-as-you go access to referance materials.
AIK
No, you are shitting me! How could this be that a virtual bookstore would be like a real one, where I could sit down and read whole books if I felt like it? Sacre blue! this will be the end of starving artist status for writers as they will no longer simply starve on publisher's returns. It will KILL the industry and no one in the world is thinking about the artists. Did I mention Libraries? Those filthy places purchase a single copy of many books and make them available for weeks at a time to anyone with a valid "I love big brother tatoo". We should all march down to our local libraries with pitchforks and torches, by God, and save the publisher's profits.
It's horrible, I tell you. Next thing you know, people will start reading and learning or something.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Author's Guild claims the reviewed contracts from "major trade publishers", and concludes the publishers don't have the rights to do this. In that case they must have selectively reviewed contracts with no mention of assignation of e-rights. Most contracts explicitly cover these, and have for years. Most often the author is forced to sign over the e-rights to get the contract. Only the Tom Clancys and Stephen Kings have enough clout to call their own contractual shots and keep their e-rights. If the publisher is assigned the e-rights, they can do this. If the author kept them, the publisher can't without permission. If a contract doesn't specify e-rights, it's a shoddy piece of work, something which corporate publisher landsharks are not known for. For my money, the Author's Guild is pulling an ACLU: making a lot of noise about something which is of little import, strictly for the publicity. (Mind you the ACLU does SOME good things, but far more often they're in the news due to pure smoke).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Is there really any thing different than going to your local book store, pulling a book off the shelf and reading it there. People have been doing that for centuries. That's how we decide whether the book is worth buying or not. Might as well sue the bookstores for having chairs and promoting 'illegal' reading of the books. The only thing new with this is it speeds up finding the book you really want.
You can't impress your co-workers and other business associates with an online book search. If each of those books you've searched were on your bookshelf, however, that's another matter entirely.
Amazon.com (whatever else may be said about them) are in business to make money, and they don't make a penny unless people buy the books (or other products) they are offering for sale.
Clearly, Amazon doesn't want to rip off authors and/or publishers, it would go against their own financial imperatives.
Those who think that a system like this can be abused are right in a sense, and wrong in a larger sense. It's really the classic question of free ridership versus an expanding marketplace.
So let's say that 1% of the people using Amazon's text search feature abuse the service and read their books online for free. Most people won't do this, by far a larger share will read some portion and this will increase their motivation to order the title. Thus, despite the few "lost sales" the overall sales increase, and profits to Amazon, the publisher, and the author are all enhanced.
The Author's Guild is concerned about that 1% though. If the search feature only increased overall sales of a title by 10%, this is a ridiculous concern.
Peace and love, y'all
>Go to the library, borrow the book and read it...
Your analogy would only make sense if I could demand the librarian make me a digital DRM-free copy of the book.
The problem here is fairly obvious, Amazon is expecting thousands of authors to "trust us with security," and these authors politely say no and you fall back on a non-sequitar library argument?
Sorry, but bought dead-tree books on rental is not the same thing as a digital copy I can mass-send/share globally.
Frankly, considering what passes off as "computer security" nowadays I would be a bit nervous too.
Also, I think its something of an insult to just tell authors "Oh, btw, you can opt-out." They or their publishers should be OPTING-IN after being informed of Amazon's plans. This attitude of "We're going to drop your book in our OCR machine because we're Amazon" should be treated with contempt.
I'm not pissing on the concept but on the implementation. This could have been done in a much more civil manner, but Amazon chose the "big-corporate do-as-we-please" way out.
Just about every other poster has been missing the point.
Everyone is talking about the technical issues of whether entire copies of books can be extracted: so basically about what type of copying can take place.
That's not the point.
The point is that the authors have rights in their works, and outside of fair use and limited other exceptions, the authors are entirely able to exercise their copyright and prevent reproduction of their work as they see fit.
Amazon may not have the right to make a copy (i.e. a scanned copy) of the book, irrespective of whether then the users can read/search that copy. A physical book is a different issue: because what you read in B&N with your coffee is that actual physical book: you may have read it, but not copying was performed in the mean time.
Resistance is futile. Your culture will be adapted to serve the Dollar. Neve mind the value for all, let's just make a quick buck!
Quote from the page: Other books at especially high risk include those that sell to the student (particularly college student) market as secondary reading. A student could easily grab the relevant chapter or two out of a book without paying for it. Students certainly have the time and most likely the inclination to do so, and, with the help of some willing colleagues, could print out the entire texts of books in the program.
Oh my, oh my. Students do not have a lot of money. Most have it ok, they can eat every other day or so, but cannot spend anything extra really. And these people are saying students should be made to spend the little money they have on ridiculously expensive books!
We'd be in the fucking outer rims of the galaxy if study books were available for everyone who is interested and cares to read them (and understand and come up with something new).
Everyone should have seen this coming.
However, at least we know that these books are digitized somewhere. Now, all we need is a good samaritan to risk getting drawn and quartered and release them somewhere on the Net...
All citizens of the US have a right to access this information.
By denying us access, the publishers and authors are stealing from us, The People.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
AuthorsGuild people write:
We believe readers will do this, and the perplexing question is whether the additional exposure for a title -- and the presumptive increase in sales -- offsets sales lost from those who just use the Amazon system to look up the section of a book when they need it.
Yeah, of course lost sales of reference books would be immense. Surely every person interested in Tuscany would buy every book about Italy or Europe available. There is no reason to think that he would somehow manage with freely available on the Web info. And if the person wants a fish recipe, he would have bought every cookbook on Amazon if not for this pesky search feature. We all know that Amazon doesn't know anything about profits, it's just a piracy organisation that doesn't really want to increase its book sales. Of course, if we let them do what they want, book sales will drop to zero and authors will...
Oh, at least these people use words such as "risk" and do not claim outright that authors will starve because of this search function.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
While I was checking it out, and seeing how difficult it would be to read Quicksilver... they deleted it.
Not entirely, you can still make the searches, but when you go to read the excerpts, they 404 on you.
That was fast.
Actually I am planning to put the entirety of my Perl slides as well as Effective Perl Programming online, as time permits. I don't think this will negatively affect sales. Frankly (this probably sounds immodest, but so be it) the customers I am looking for will need the paper version so they can wear it out.
... I suspect that my contract with A-W (now AWL or Pearson, depending which rung of the ladder you look at) gives them sufficient electronic rights to enable Amazon to create a searchable text, but I don't know whether it does or doesn't. I do know that Amazon has sold many, many copies of my book, and with luck this will help sell more. It doesn't seem to me that it could hurt.
/.-ers may not be aware of is that some publishers (by no means *all*) will give authors considerable flexibility in their contract terms. Some things are typically non-negotiable, like international translations and royalties (it's just too complicated anyway), but many other aspects, including various types of exclusivity, can be adjusted to suit both parties.
;-)
Authors in the reference and cookbook business are SOL anyway, because the internet will inevitably shrivel that market down to the size of the completely internet illiterate. It's a funny thing, though. Even my 60-something year old mom can send email and surf the web now.
As far as permission in my contract goes
One thing that many
Many authors are fearful that the value in their books is in the information and not in its physical presentation. In my experience, that is not yet the case. I would never, for example, use a computerized version of Joy of Cooking (and besides, it would have the sucky "new" recipes in it, nevermind requiring me to have a splashproof computer near the stove). There are some horrible books that people do consider disposable - Java "references" that are out of date when they hit the shelves, for example - but other more carefully written programming texts are not much fun to read on a glowing computer screen. Nor do they look good on a bookshelf.
-joseph
when do we get made that patents are ruining innovation. I'm all for people being paid fairly for what they produce. But this is one of the biggest innovations in the book industry. Imagine going into the largets bookstore in the world and being able to not only find all the books written about a subject, but also being able to find books that mention your subject in only a limited way. Its a boon for researchers on a budget.
Whew, this is a tricky situation.
On one hand I am impressed that authors have such rights over there work. If only musicians had it so good.
However I think the Authors Guild needs to take a step back and take some deep breaths.
How about the guild agrees not to discuss this for a week?
In the end I will have respect for there decision.
However, Amazon's new feature is a GREAT way to sell hard to find books.
The first time you type in some obscure phrase that really shouldn't get a logical hit on Amazon, and the search engine gives you a bunch, you are sold.
It is the online equivelant to walking into a bookstore and telling the clerk you are looking for a book on 'servecing the static port of a Beechcraft turboprop' and having the clerk reply '3 rows back on your left, 2nd shelf from the top 23'rd book from the aisle side of the shelf, page 167 2nd paragraph, 3rd sentence.'.
How could this feature not sell books?
Bravo to Amazon.
It's the same as going to bookstores browsing through books you like, only quicker and money saving.
If you like the way people traveling in carts, horse chariots, go ahead and waste your time, otherwise, let people with minds push technology upwards.
Bzzzt. No, you're wrong, but thanks for playing. All books do NOT belong to the public once they are published. They still belong to the author, who has licensed limited rights to the publisher in exchange for publishing, distribution, promotion, etc. Copyright laws say that the work will eventually pass into the public domain, but according to, let's say the Berne Convention, that time is author's life plus 50. (Leaving the United States' Incarcerate Mickey Mouse Forever Act out of the discussion for now.)
The author may choose to make his/her works available under certain circumstances earlier. For instance, I am published under copyright by a major publisher, and I self-publish under Creative Commons, which is a GNU GPL-ish flavour of copyright. And I while I would not want to deny people access to my work, I do have the right to maintain control over what people do with my work once they access it. For instance, you do not have the right to take my Creative Commons work and sell it commercially; you may take it, modify it, use it non-commercially, etc. (The CC licenses have a fair amount of flexibility and granularity.)
In the case of Amazon, technically, the Search In a Book could be argued as part of "fair use." The possibility for it to be misused exists, but the permitted uses far exceed the potential for misuse. The argument that says cookbooks and reference books will suffer through this technology may be true, but no truer than today, when someone sits down in a Barnes & Noble, takes a recipe book from the shelf, and copies down a recipe.
Ultimately, however, the choice as to whether to be included or not should be the author's, without coercion from the publisher. Some authors will be sufficiently enlightened to know that they stand a greater chance of being found this way and opt-in; others will choose to opt-out. It can be done with a choice of IN/OUT at the time a book contract is signed.
If they are saying reading this short part is causing a problem, trying to make it illegal im assuming. Does this mean that librarys are illegal too? people get the book, lots in fact, but how many are paying to read it? Also does this make book stores illegal, or will all books come shrinkwrapped? I can go to the store and read that much of the book and enjoy coffee too.... I understand this is a copyright issue, but DEAR GOD EVERYONE SIMMER DOWN! its money issues too...
Yes, I realize that book piracy has always been an issue with publishers. Seems as if you didn't read my comment to closesly.
In fact, perhaps you skipped over a key phrase from my original comment:
Book counterfeiters are one perl-script away from obtaining the full-text of the latest Harry Potter book and printing up their own illicit copies for street sale. Yeah, there are already fake copies of bestsellers floating around out there, but now making them will become that much easier.
My point is that now people who didn't even consider doing book-counterfeiting will be able to because Amazon.com's service will make it easy. Mind-boggling easy.
Do you want to re-key the entire text of Cryptonomicon? Or even do a tedious OCR and cleanup? Or would you rather have a perl script do it for you in 2 hours?
Again, I know what I'm talking about - yes, photocopying, sharing, re-keying etc has always been a problem for publishers (we will leave out blatant criminal theft of master electronic files, which is 99% chance what happened with Harry Potter) - but for most people, photocopying an entire book is too big of pain to justify doing it on the scale that hurts publishers.
Amazon's system, however, opens the door of book pirating for the masses. Mark my words.
(Also, you seem be trying to bait me into a religious argument about whether or not authors actually "own" the works they write once they are published - that all information should be free, etc. Well, I have no interest in such debate. Maybe someone else will take you up on it).
Baen Free Library
:)
Free books authorized by the authors and hosted by a book publisher.
Go read why they are doing it, it's an excellent read. It explains the objection to DRM and the "internet piracy panic". It supports the existance of libraries and private book-lending.
Awesome. The next time you buy a book, look for Baen
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"Your analogy would only make sense if I could demand the librarian make me a digital DRM-free copy of the book"
Well, you can't *demand* anything dude.
And further, paper books have no "DRM" (fancy word for copy protection).
Do you know how all those books are on usenet and kazaa? Do you think somebody broke the copy protection?
No dude. Somebody *scanned* it.
So please, you're a fuckwit. There's nothing wrong with Amazon's implementation. If a few greedy professors selling $160 textbooks are screwed, then so what... they begged for it by raising prices to 4 times what its worth and basically gave a big FUCK YOU to the students. You're pissed off that students have a way of saying "fuck you" right back at the professor.
So the publisher does not have the unilateral right to authorize this kind of search.
No training is needed. A little peanut butter and you're all set.
Well, how about checking the copyright law? I would be very surprised if it said the author owns the book. The last time I checked, you could only own the copyright, not the book itself (although you can own a physical copy of it).
Ergo, someone else owns the books. And it's the society. The society granted certain rights to the authors, but these are only temporary and do not imply that the book is owned by the author. No. Once it is published, we can say that the public owns it (although, as always with immaterial goods, using the term "own" is an oversimplification.
Regardless of what is the author's choice should be, this is irrelevant. What is important, though, is what are the current laws and what does the public think. If the public thinks that all books should be searchable through Amazon, the Congress can pass an amendment to the Copyright Law and specifically allow such use.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Yeah, I can already imagine that. Millions of Internet users writing Perl scripts to get the full text from Amazon database. Perl scripts, no shit.
Fine you can use Python, PHP, Visual Basic, Assembler, whatever, I don't care.
And who said anything about "millions?" I think dozens will do. On the other hand, perhaps you've heard of this phenomenon known as the "script-kiddie?"
Harry Potter was, in fact, scanned by readers (100% chance). There are enough accounts of that on the net. Scanning is easy. For the average person it's probably more so than writing a Perl script.
Let's see. Would you rather 1) scan and clean up a book (OCR is not 100% effective) or 2) get the master quark files from someone at one of the numerous printing companies that they had churning out this book. I'm sure it was done both ways, but
only one of them could start printing "same-day" and was completely indistiguishable from genunine copies.
Look, I'm not passing judgement people who counterfeit books. I'm just making the observation that 1) doing so will become much easier/faster than it was in the past and 2) it probably won't hurt book sales anyway. Also you could add
3) I'm not interested in the whole "Information wants to be free" debate that is so prevelant here on YRO...
Buh bye.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
this sounds like a rerun of the RIAA ripping the rights away from musicians. needless to say it's not very nice and we should burn the author's guild after we've taken care of the RIAA. well, the MPAA too.
And saying they could "find" some program on to do this automatically, is akin to me saying, "I'll just pay someone to photocopy the book for me"...
Hell, my freshmen year, someone paid me to do just that with my physics book.
Look, jwiegley, you are making blanket statements about the publishing industry that do not apply to vast majority of publishers - like the one I work for.
First of all, we *leeches* research the market before accepting a book proposal, proofread, edit the material, reformat nearly all the submitted material, insert all the diagrams, photos, and art work, secure the rights to said art work, have the work peer-reviewed and/or tested, create our own artwork for the cover and for other material in the book, create any extraneous material like instructor material - including Power Point slides, test banks, and any online support material (eg, BlackBoard, WebCT, etc) - create & produce student CD for the same material, promote the the book through advertising, give away hundreds of free desk copies (some Professors make thousands selling their desk copies to you students), pay for that shipping, spend countless hours and dollars phoning and visiting these *customers* to get them to use our (and the author's) book, warehouse the books, process orders, pack the books for shipping, refund money on all returns, and the list goes on. This is the short list of the things we *leeches* do and have to pay for. When you say the publisher is going to be obsolete, I have to laugh. You don't have a clue.
(BTW: Our textbooks are sold ONCE, then they are sold *used* over and over without us or the author making a dime. Sales are minimal after the initial push of a textbook).
Second, your idea that publishers are a bunch of robber barons is idiocy. Small publishers are folding or being bought up by larger houses at an alarming rate. When I started here 16 months ago we had 8 employees. Now we have 4. Our business might not make it into next year. By the way, I make peanuts. I have no health insurance.
Do the larger publishing houses make tons of money? Yes and no. Their heyday was over when Amazon and B&N gained a stranglehold on the marketplace. If you want a villian, look there. Amazon & B&N are the ones who really control what books get noticed and now they are undermining both the author and publisher by selling used books - what do they care if they author makes money?
Lastly, the author signs a contract with a publisher. Did they not read it before signing it? Did they not shop their book around for the best offer? Exactly how does the author get ripped off in this exchange? Did they not hire an agent or lawyer to look at the contract?
Your accusations just don't jive with reality, jwiegly.
(just curious: have you been *victimized* by a publisher?)
I'm trying to get in contact with you and can't find any other way than this right now. E-mail me: godsife@yahoo.com ~Ann