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.
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 --
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.
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
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!
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.
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 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