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."
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...
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.
They show the page the hit was on, and 2 pages on either side of it. No more than 20% of a book can be viewed in a month. The Guild is arguing that for cookbooks and travel books, the information you are searching for is concentrated enough that no one would ever have to purchase those books. Their other example is college students banding together to print out entire volumes. Valid concerns, I'd say.
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?" `":" #");}
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.
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