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."
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.
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.
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.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
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 --
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Not absurd at all. The AUTHOR still owns the work. Typically, the publishing contract will cover Book, and sometimes eBook form. Open, no compensation publishing on the web is not covered. The author is entitled to compensation, and the publisher isn't entitled to say "oh that's ok, go ahead" because the book does not belong to them.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
O'Reilly owns those works, and can do what they like with them. Authors of O'Reilly books are either employees of O'Reilly, or contracted to write for them.
Authors who do not work for their publishers retain all ownership of their own works (unless they're foolish enough to sign them away, which most are'nt) Publishing a book in one form does not give you the right to distribute it in another form, without a seperate agreement with the owner of the work.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
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.
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
> Open, no compensation publishing on the web is not covered.
All dear, someone who's never been in the business. Many, probably most, book contracts say that essentially all practical rights belong to them.
Frankly, one reason why I almost never write books and stick to magazines and newspapers is not only do they pay better, but at least in that side of the biz, you know up front that your rights are bought and sold.
Steven
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
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.
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.
False. Fair use allows an individual to make one copy of part of a book or journal or magazine for their own "fair use". If an instructor wishes to distribute an entire chapter or article to the entire class, royalties are due to the author and/or publisher. Yeah, it seems like a loophole, but there's a difference between putting a book on reserve and allowing students to photocopy the relevant chapter and handing out 30 copies to an entire class.
False.
Fair use permits everything and nothing. That is, there are no absolutes as to what is and is not a fair use. Anything MIGHT be, or might not be. It _depends_. It depends on the specific facts of the fair use in question, as analyzed through the four-step test of 17 USC 107.
Under the right circumstances, it is totally okay to distribute an entire copy of a book. Under other circumstances it would not be okay to distribute evne a paragraph.
It always depends.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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?
First prize for forgetting/not reading that this is tied to your credit card, and that Spamazon (forgive maybe, forget no) limits you to a certain number of views total, and also a certain number _per_book_. Enough to stop you reading the whole thing (unless you're patient enough to do it over a whole year - but in that case, why not ask your local library for a copy repeatedly, and wait until they get it in).
As opposed to, say, going into Barnes & Nobel and drinking coffee while reading the whole thing free?
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.
What a waste of energy! Instead of clicking a few keys for convenient access to information, you needed: 1) the sun to pump out a bunch of energy for plants. 2) you had to eat a bunch of that food for calories. 3) had to spend that energy using inefficient legs to walk to your inefficient car to drive to the library to check out a heavy deadtree book. 4) that wasted time in transit and in line could have been used more productively. !!! :-)
Here's to the efficiency of sitting on our asses.
--
Power to the Peaceful
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.
This is because you sip your coffee, instead of chugging it like a Real Programmer.
I'm a math student and I hope to write my own textbook some day. Not because I'll get royalties for it, but because I want to make it cheap and fill it with curse words. That's the way text books should be.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
>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.
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.
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
The stupid thing is that the authors and Amazon want the same thing - to sell more books. But since this is America they are diving with legal challenges in public instead of figuring out how to make this work to the adantage of all concerned.
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?