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.
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 --
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.
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
They show +/- 2 pages from the one the searched phase is on (total of 5 pages). However, a cake recipe isn't going to be more than that (in fact, many are only a half-page in big cookbooks). Ditto for most reference materials, which unlike novels don't depend on a storyline, but rather looking up small chunks of info.
GL
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.
Ah, yeah, that's way too much content to be displaying, then. If they merely cut back the amount of text displayed to, say, a paragraph or less, then I think everything would be hunky-dory.
Or, they could change the amount of text displayed based on the type of content. Less for a cookbook or reference book, and more for a novel. This is the first time anyone's done this, so hopefully a little finetuning will be forthcoming. Demonizing Amazon.com has historically had NO effect on their behaviour, so hopefully a more intelligent & reasoned approach will work.
Certainly, bitching about it on Slashdot won't do a damned thing.
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.
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
Please! Writers of non-fiction never have lucative careers (darn it!) and our fame is, shall we say, small.
Plagiarism is always a problem. Amazon, like the Web and Google before it, makes it easier to steal rather than harder.
Steven
I have friends.
A group of people can easily download the entire book, stitch it together, and release it to the wild. Not a good thing. I don't know how this works, but it may even be possible for a group of people to do this using a simple program that runs in the background.
There's no way Amazon is ever going to get away with this program - it will be abused. I can understand why Amazon is doing this (they want to be more like a physical book store), but this service is just asking to be abused.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
>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.
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