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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."
It depends on the language of their contracts with the writers. I spent quite some time looking at tech books on Amazon last night, and can't honestly say I'd be thrilled if it were possible to read 10-20 pages at a time from a technical book I'd written.
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...
"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.
True But this DOES mean that a full text version of the book is Available on the database somewhere. Which means if one person figures out how to get it, everyone has the book for free (thanks to kazaa and sharing.)
:) C'mon! Its what they do best!
Then again, many other sites offer ebooks for a price... which means they also must have full text versions available. So, i Suppose the publishers are just protecting themselves against possible danger.
oh, and being pains in the asses
~Just keep eating, porky. Fat people are harder to kidnap.
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.
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.
The authors are right on this. A service that allows Internet access to a scanned image of an arbitrary page of any book is just begging to be misused. The service doesn't require images of the actual pages to be served. Removing this feature would allow the search to still be useful but would remove the possibility of people downloading the entire book for free.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
From my understanding, no content is being sold, or made available, outside of book form.
Then your understanding is incorrect. Amazon makes available the page where the search hit is found, plus the previous and subsequent two pages each, for a total of five pages per hit. In many cases (examples are given as cookbooks and travel books) this may be all the viewer cares about.
In other cases, it doesn't take much ingenuity to figure a way to get the whole book. (The Guild did 100-page sections, as proof.)
No wonder authors are annoyed.
-- Alastair
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 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.
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'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.
JayBlalock said, "But, do you honestly think the number of people who would go to such lengths to get a free book would outnumber those who buy a book because they've verified it contains the information they want? It's not like in your scenario, the publishers are losing hundreds in book sales. That same group of students would, logically, band together and buy ONE book to share otherwise."
Well, yes and no.
I agree that, overall, the number of people who would go to such lengths would NOT outnumber those who buy a book because they verified its contents. That is, OVERALL, I think this system could increase sales.
But college students are a different kettle of fish. This is a group of people that, as a regular social activity, shares, downloads, and watches movies on our computers. And enough of us have been raised computer literate to help teach those who aren't. So while publishers in general might not lose hundreds of book sales, I think a system like this could potentially kill (or at least maim) on-campus book stores.
With a system like this, coupled with even two or three people per class who knew how to abuse it, a class as a whole could (like I theorized in my above post) have a 'book party' where the three people who downloaded their sections of the book meet with everyone at the library, they all pay their $15 to print the couple hundred pages, and they all get their books.
I'll give two potential real world examples: I can see my computer programing class (~45 computer literate people) meeting to do this, easy. Hell, someone in the class could probably write the program to do it. (Not myself. Not because I wouldn't want to, but because I wouldn't know how. But there are definatly those who would.) And, on the other end of the spectrum, I can also see people like myself talking to my Analysis and Performance of Literature class and aranging everyone to meet to save $50 on the mandatory textbook. To give me even more incentive to print the book at the library, I'd rather have the book of short stories, plays, and poems that we use for that class bound in a notebook. Easier to make notes, highlight, take pages out for memorization, etc.
Truth be told, I don't know a huge number of people who buy their textbooks from Amazon.com. But looking beyond Amazon.com, I can see something like this causing a drop in textbook sales across the board.
For my own personal and selfish gain, I kind of hope Amazon.com 'wins' this battle. In which case you can meet me in the library next week and we'll print some textbooks. You get the first half, and I'll get the second?
As I said, I think the Authors Guild is overreacting. I think shutting down the system across all books would be a mistake. In fiction, for example, I can only see a system like this increasing sales. But in specific cases, mostly involving education(textbooks, expensive reference sets, etc), I can understnad why publishers would not be happy with the idea of this going through.
-Trillian
Think about how very fond you are of "opt out" email. The idea that an author could remove their book, after some elaborate procedure, if they are aware their book is indexed in the first place, is less than compelling.
Mind you, even as an author (but one whose writing if available for free, as well as for money), I'm not per se agreeing with the Author's Guild. What I can see on Amazon looks like fair use quotations. But it might well be possible to easily reconstruct more of the text in a book that would qualify under fair use.
One thing to keep in mind is that authors generally get majorly screwed over by publishers. E.g. Random House isn't really a whole lot more interested in "protecting authors" than the RIAA is in "protecting musicians".... so if a publisher has given permission, don't imagine they do it to help authors, nor even in conformance with the contracts they signed with those authors.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Actually my calculus class uses a textbook written by the professor, it is one of my cheapest books ($35) and it follows the curriculum exactly and any errors found one year are certain to be fixed the next, unlike certain publishing companies, also the fact that the book is only printed on the front of each page allows alot of people to take their notes right in the textbook.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
I see the reasoning here, but they should think about how many people aren't buying books because they don't know which book has the information they want. I can think of a few times I've gone to the book store to buy a book with hopes of solving a particular problem. I had to go there, take the book off the shelf, flip a few pages, and even risk reading the solution and ending my demand for that book. With a service like this, I could ease my search time, and even find books I wouldn't have found otherwise, no extra risk.
I just wish they'd sit back and think of a few important factors:
Sitting at the computer to read a book isn't fun.
Books are generally priced reasonably, it's difficult to imagine that it's worth the effort to go download books regularly.
As proven by electronic manuals, people like having the book there in their hands.
It seems to me that if people were really willing to jump through hoops and use a hack and a half to get a book online, they should consider revising how e-books work. Frankly, I think the technology is heading there anyway. Lots of people have PDAs out there, and paying for virtual stuff doesn't seem so strange these days.
In any case, history has proven that the more exposure you give people to a product, the more they want it. We're all sick of the "open your mouth and close your eyes" business model. Want me to buy your book? Let me read a chapter or two of it. (Yes, I know that sometimes a sample chapter of a book is released.) Want me to watch a movie coming out soon? Instead of giving me a 2 minute teaser that really doesn't tell you anything about a movie, make 10 minutes of the movie available on-line. Want me to buy an hour of music? Let me listen to it first.
Funny thing is, the internet can provide these services, but the people behind it are scared. Are they scared of change, or are they scared that they'll have to work harder to make money? I mean, who'd go see that Britney Spears movie if they saw 10 minutes of it?
"Derp de derp."
Several credit card companies will issue a new credit card number for online transactions - a number with a pre-set limit and a limited number of uses before it expires. Not only is that useful for pretty much stopping theft, it also would be fairly handy for scraping this amazon service.
:)
As far as tracking the IP, a quick google search for "public anonymizing proxy" will pretty handily take care of hiding your access to anything over standard http.
I guess that puts this post in the violation of the DMCA, as it describes a method for circumventing Amazon's copy protection scheme, right?