Slashdot Mirror
Publishers Protest Google Library Project
gollum123 writes "A group of academic publishers is challenging Google Inc.'s plan to scan millions of library books into its Internet search engine index, highlighting fears that the ambitious project will violate copyrights and stifle future sales. In a letter scheduled to be delivered to Google Monday, the Association of American University Presses described the online search engine's library project as a troubling financial threat to its membership -- 125 nonprofit publishers of academic journals and scholarly books. The university presses depend on books sales and other licensing agreements for most of their revenue, making copyright protections essential to their survival."
My favorite take on the "loss of sales" argument comes from Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing on March 3, 2005:
i s_why_a.html
"When reporters ask me why I give away the full text of my novels online, for free, the day they're available in shops, I tell 'em: "It's about word of mouth. My readers have large social circles of friends whom they never see face to face. Books like Sisters of Ya Ya Sisterhoood became a success because one friend went to another friend and handed her a copy of the book, saying, 'You must read this, it changed my life.' I want to give my readers the same ability, so I have to give them a form of the book that they can 'hand' to their friends over the Internet. Even if it displaces some sales, the most valuable thing an author can get is a personal recommendation, it's the thing that is most likely to sell more copies of my books."
Linky: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/03/wordofmouth_
Shouldnt non-profit people be in favour of this?
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
Why is it that Google is scanning copyright-protected works?
I thought that was flagrantly illegal, and the fines for willful copyright infringement are steep, even for a company with Google's money.
What's going on?
D
Remember, that libraries generally have one copy of a book (sometimes more, but rare) and that a person is borrowing it. So if you read a book at the library and wanted to have your own - you had to buy it. By having all of these publications online, people will have a digital copy of them for free. This *will* hinder book sales. While some people might want the nice hardbound copy - most people will just settle for the digital copy which is just as good.
FOr example, in my life, there are very few books that I have read in digital format that I have bought to have as a hard copy.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
"making copyright protections essential to their survival."
The question you really have to ask is: is THEIR survival essential?
Do we really need their services?
Side note: WTF is up with this crap to "confirm you're not a script" that I have to type in...jesus christ it's not like slashdot is giving free email. Man, I remember when you could post as much as you as many times as you want now there's all these ridiculous rules. No wonder I barely read this site anymore.
described the online search engine's library project as a troubling financial threat to its membership
The horror.
Making the texts searchable - provided they only show a small snippet and a reference to the book for the rest - sounds EXACTLY like fair use to me.
Especially for academic papers, where being able to find the reference is critical to advancement of the field, and the citer would have to obtain and read more than the snippet anyhow.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If the journals don't like being published online by google, they will stop publishing, fizzle, and something else will come and replace them...
Now if only the RIAA/MPAA would have the same fate... Google, help me out here!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Honestly, this can be a great financial gain for those publishers, if they get together with Google on how to best select enticing pieces of their copyrighted works in order to drive sales, the academic community will have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
If I can get for free at my library I should be able to get it free on my computer.
So if I understand correctly, group of "non-profit" publishers is worried this will have negative effect on their potential profit?
Information wants to be free. No more free rides. If you want to survive then develop a book reader you can use in the bathtub and market it.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"It's Google Inc. now eh?
I'm not sure why you're modded as funny, but I feel that you're misinformed. They have been Google, Inc..
Luddites are protesting the installation of machines in factories. They say manual labor is vital for their survival.
Fucking idiots. Instead of working with the industry on a micropayment systems that would allow me to buy books in electronic form at way less than $50 a piece (of which the author is lucky to receive $1) they will sabotage this stuff, and when it finally comes of age three or four years later they'll cite decreased revenues (of course, you morons) and "intellectual property violations".
They do have to pay the light bill. I don't think it's a fair complaint though. If they're making the non-public-domain works search-only, then these companies should be happy because it may drive additional buyers to them.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Dear Association of American University Presses:
Please rename yourself University Presses Association of America so that we may refer to
all evil bastard organizations as *AA.
Thank You!
Non-profit doesn't mean No-money-at-all. They still have to pay for the ink, paper, binding, (possibly)writers, rental space, light bulbs, heat... Or do you expect these people to donate money to something they're working on for free?
Also, very frequently, non-profit organizations pay their workers. Where do you think that money comes from?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Personally, I detest having to go to the library, search through often poorly organized books during certain hours only to find I have to come back for them to order it. An Online Library would be perfect. No waits, no returns, no damaged books, able to grab them at home-copy them to my PDA and read. Heck, I'd even pay a decent subscription service fee. What I will not pay is the ridiculous $7-20 for a digital version of a book that sells hardcover, printed, in store for the same price.
We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
With a caveat...that author chooses to have his books in digital format to give for free. Again, he *chooses*. Each author/publisher should have the right to choose.
Google, in the end, is making a profit from offering this service. So there plans to scan these copies (at no direct monetary benefit to the author/publisher), make them available *for free*, and they make a profit... That is a bit unfair...and even if they didn't make a profit - the author should still have a say. A lot of people put time and effort and it is their right to choose - not some third parties right.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Although I know it probably won't cover out of print fiction books. I've got at least one book that I can't remember the title/author but could quote enough passages or facts to find it.
How many books could there be about a 1-eyed ex-programmer turned fencing instructor who was the original programmer of a computer made of cloned brain tissue that is the server for a MMRPG but has developed consciousness due to another ex-programmer who, dying of cancer, imprinted himself into the game just before he died. But he died partway through the process and, since he was a wizard in the game, summoned the consciousness of the computer into the game in an attempt to access past "saves" of himself to fill in the blank spots, but botches the spell causing the consciousness of the computer to lock in all the other players in the game as hostages. This causes management to abduct the original programmer and force him to go in to the game, using an unimplemented bard class, and convince the consciousness(who, due to some freudian complications, considers itself female and wants to bone the original programmer) to let everyone go.
And that's just the first couple chapters. Given a chance to do a literal search I'd probably just quote a line the programmer says after realizing he still had root access when faced with a bunch of demons "go to hell go directly to hell do not pass go do not collect 200 credits" plus enough random words to narrow it down a bit(for example, partway through he searches for a set of Katana+Wakizashi that grants wishes and is guarded by a Medusa and that the cancer-programmer/wizard has a tortoise for a familiar).
On the off chance anybody recognizes this book(from the late 80's early 90's I think) I'll give you all my mod points:)
In a letter scheduled to be delivered to Google Monday...
Did anyone else do a double take on this? I almost crapped myself (Google fanboy)... "OMG, Google is going to customize my weekdays!"
Saturday will be in Beta 18 months.
Cleaning the net one sed at a time! s/sex/sermons/; s/hot/holy/; s/goats/thebible/; www.holysermonswiththebible.com
Reading a book on computer is an unpleasant annoyance. Most consumers are more than willing to fork out $5-8 for a bound copy. Those cusumers who choose to read rather than exclusivly watch DVDs for entrertainment anyhow.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I guess it depends on what they are scanning. If it is mostly scientific journals used for research it might not infringe on copyrights. If they are scanning the NY Times Bestseller list for public distribution, that would be a huge violation. I have to assume that Google has a team of lawyers looking into every aspect of this project. It would be a very bad business move to be one of the most popular sites on the Internet and provide illegal content.
Maybe they will register googlez.com and start a warez site for this project.
/. ++
I think they need a dictonary
You don't say
Free XBox, PS2
How dare Google make information more readily available to the general public while reducing the need to use physical resources at the same time! How dare they!
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
It is interesting to see reaction as Google moves it's search technology into printed matter. The copyright issues are actually somewhat similar. To create a search engine for the internet or for printed matter Google has to *copy* copyrighted material to their servers and the same goes for printed matter.
Technically, to my non-lawyers knowledge, what Google does with the internet is illegal but is granted a free pass, in part because the material on the internet has to be copied via the internet to be viewed at all. Copying the content of books is only slightly different. Unlike the internet, there is no printed equivalent of a "norobots" or "nofollow" tag to automatically ask Google to skip printed matter.
This just needs the right pricing model built.
1) Google charges a small fee to the content consumer to view the entire content and conveys that back to the publisher (perhaps taking a small cut)- publisher does not have to thus pay the costs associated with producing a dead-tree version- all profit. Google also makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to reconstruct the entire content from excerpts (algorithm up to them). Optional/devious: Google makes small changes to the wording/grammar/punctuation of the content in order to trace back to a purchaser in the event of a leak.
2) Google runs AdWords along the side and takes a portion of that as profit and pays the other portion to the publisher.
3) The cost to the consumer to view the content on Google should be less than purchasing the dead-tree version.
4) Profit (for everyone)!
The publishers may have a reasonable issue with Googles intention to copy some copyrighted works. If the project were to limit its accessibility to Public Domain works, the publishers would not be able to legitimately gripe. I suspect that the copyrighted work at issue is such that it is no longer in print & therefore generally unavailable for purchase.
However, a more serious concern is that Congress seems to perpetually insist on extending copyrights to the point that they are virtually perpetual. (I suspect that they are up to about 100 years.) If a publisher has a copyright, but decides that a work should not be in print - it is effectively censored.
This perpetual extension of copyrights (likely soon to be followed by business process patents,- Quick, give me $.05 for viewing this web page;) limites the use of useful works to those whom can pay the entrance fee. Assuming that the works are still in print.
If a publisher has a work that is unavailable (e.g. not in print), but copyrighted then they should have some way to disseminate it before they complain. The perpetual extensions of copyright are an issue that everyone should have their representatives address. (I can't help you. I live in DC, my representative has not voting power on the floor of Congress)
If you want change, you have to speak up.
Are these people complaining the ones responsible for the fact that at my university, the only way to get some info about something published in a journal was to log into some arcane heavily protected system and be told that the journal you are looking for is at another university, four stories underground, and protected by forcefields?
Are they the ones that feel that its justified to charge 200 dollars for a 5 dollar-value book ('journal') because they control the distribution... in which case... I hope they DO lose out.
with the scratch these university publishers skim off me (each semester!) they could give Christmas to Ethiopia for a week. Thanks for new minor revisions every year so i don't get anything back for used books!
i have very little sympathy for these crooks.
$
yeah, all that digital ink and cyber-paper must get expensive. I've stopped accepting PDFs because they're divided into pages. That would cost a fortune!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
As I creative person I am offended that someone could possibly catch a glimpse of something I've toiled over without giving me shiny gold coins.
.01% - 'artists'
I think we've got to nip this problem in the bud, and pronto! I think the most expedient system would be some sort of coin operated hood that could be welded onto consumer's heads. If you want to see or hear art, you simply need to drop some coins into the mechanism to open the shutter for a set amount of time.
This would mean a constant flow of income that could be distributed to all creative people as follows:
46 % - 'administration'
28 % - Lawyer fees
22 % - car payments
13 % - more lawyer fees
21 % - distribution
12 % - math consultants
8.2% - contingency
The only possible flaw with this plan is that the percentages add up to more than %100 percent, meaning that there would be an actual loss of profit, but I think the 'artist' could kick in an make up for that loss since they started this whole thing.
air and light and time and space
of course universities would hate a freely searchable index ... means they can't sell the 17th edition of "Introductory Number Theory" or something equally trivial [and well covered in the textbooks spanning the last CENTURY]...
... last I checked Calculus hasn't changed that much [specially at the level 1/2 levels] in the last century to require a 2nd edition let alone a 7th.
If you can look up quotes/citations/etc without shelling out for overly expensive dead trees... they'd lose their valuable money pit.
Personally I'm glad to be out of College. Not that I bought the books while I was there [well the ones I could avoid I did]. Even in my community college we had 7th edition level 1 and 2 calculus books
To me "7th edition" says two things. Purposeful re-write and "sloppy editors".
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Like street-sweepers protesting the loss of horse manure to sweep, these publishing houses seem to have trouble following historical trends.
Another way to look at it is that they have missed their first calling, which is to disseminate academic information, by becoming enslaved to the profit they make on a particular method of doing so.
Cynically, perhaps they are afraid that once the bulk of their collections are online people will discover that most of what they publish is rehashed from older work. No, I don't seriously think that.
But I do seriously think that the academic publishing business, like the newspaper business, is transitioning to the Internet.
It's time to lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Google makes it extremely clear that they won't be violating copyrights. So what more do these publishers want?
Perhaps they just want to cast a pall of doubt over something that (quite legally) diminishes their reasons for existing.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
People will use this to find a resource, then go to the bookstore or library and BAMO it works, the customer wins finding obscure resources, and the vendor wins with more sales.
Call me naive, but isn't the main mission of a university press to disseminate information as widely as possible? They exist mainly because Penguin and Random House and the like don't see a huge earnings potential in publishing narrowly focussed academic material. Google can be a huge help to academic publishers by helping potential customers locate their material. At the same time, Google will help customers to be more discriminating in their purchases. Academic publishers will need to streamline their operations. They should really hop on the print-on-demand bandwagon so that they print only what they sell.
Coined the word Sabotage. (The story I heard: French workers used to wear wooden shoes called Sabo and put them in the gears of the machines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage )
Of course, the Luddites did the same thing: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite)
Everyone together now: Non-profit.
Once again: Non-profit.
Which doesn't mean they can't charge money for their services in order to support their activities.
So; what *exactly* are you trying to say in that deliberately simplistic manner? That those responsible for putting together such journals should be able to do so on an income of precisely $0?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Ok, how about this? Bandwidth and power for servers. Even if these presses were to go digital, they would still have expenses. Not to mention the staff. There is really no getting around that one. Somebody has to run the place. Somebody has to get paid to run the place.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
You might be the one who needs a dictionary. What the do you think non-profit means? It sure as hell doesn't mean "operating at a loss". These publishers incur substantial costs for proofreading, peer review, layout, and editing (not to mention the massive printing costs), and even as non-profits they rightfully make up the costs for this by selling their end products.
Effectively, non-profit just means that they don't have owners who are driven by a desire for huge shares of dividends and profits. Instead, business revenue is supposed to go back into their operations that further the public good. That's it.
are like 100 to 200 dollars per book, this sounds like a good project for people that cannot afford the books.
I am sorry but I feel no pity for the Universities and book publishers. They 'make money' on selling the same recycled crap year after year and calling each one a new edition.
Everyone together now: Google For-profit.
Once again: For-profit.
So why should a for-profit company (Google) do so without paying the people who they are copying from?
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I think the key here is that the typical use pattern for academic works is different than for works intended for the general public. Frequently the reader of an academic journal is interested only in a specific fact, and they will often be able to glean this fact from the small amount of context provided in the Google search results. This threatens the revenue model of academic journal publishers, which is a form of bundling, namely, charging the university libraries for the whole journal or for several related journals put out by the same publisher.
Or do you expect these people to donate money to something they're working on for free?
:-p
Seems to work fine for open source projects.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Instead of using lawsuits, they should just screen-scrape Google, scrub out the ads and the Google logo and offer the result as a free service.
After that, we can see how Google likes it.
there's no place like ~
highlighting fears that the ambitious project will violate copyrights and stifle future sales.
How about stifiling innovation, education and learning? It would seem that capitalism is at odds with general betterment of humaity.
yeah, a huge load Google is putting on their servers by scanning single copies of their books and hosting them on Google servers. Don't they have any concern for the companies producing these things?
Their are legitimate expenses in producing books which google could cut into. I'm not saying Google is Right, I'm saying You are Wrong.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I'm involved in free distribution of text too (http://www.verbumvanum.org/ and I'm utterly amazed at the attitude even so-called 'non-profit' orgs have.
The whole goddamn IP thing should be abolished, I say. True, copyrights are less worse then patents, but still; it's just not of these times anymore. Just as the feodal system didn't work anymore in the industrial age, so doesn't IP work anymore in the cyberage.
In any case, if the authors gave permission, or, if it is in the public domain (which in first instance would be the case, since they'll start with pre-1920 books, as I've understood), then what the f- are they complaining about.
Maybe they earned money distributing books that were in the public domain? Well, heck, though then. I mean, what, we aren't here to subsidise non-profits, after all, and while I understand they're complaining from their view, it's a free market, after all.
I've been wondering, btw. Why didn't anyone come up with the idea to make one giant liberary, with a system that 'lends' ebooks? After three weeks it can't be used anymore, and it becomes available in the lib repository again. That way, it'll EXACTLY work like a regular lib, bypassing all the 'but they copy my work' whiners.
The longer this crap continues, the longer I'm thinking society should move on, and stimulate a sort of mass-online patronage, or an improved flatfee thingy, like we already have now on many 'blanc' copymedia. This way, we would prevent all those lonesome, poor, starving musicians from a terrible hunger-death, and people could do what they already are doing, but then legal.
The current system has become obsolete; people that don't get that yet, are worse off then Don Quichotte.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
In other news, millions of trees around the globe raised their leaves and branches in thunderous applause in praise of the Google project.
I guess the battle is finally on as the days of printed paper medium begin to finally tick down. Like the recording industry, the print industry doesn't quite understand yet that their customers no longer want their products in the old formats. While I personally still like a printed book, I'm enjoying the added portability that digital media is providing. I look forward to the day I can carry my entire library in the palm of my hand, just as I now do with my music collection!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
To quote from an article in Chronicle of Higher Education, reprinted in Prime Palaver #10, Michael Jensen (their director of publishing technologies) said:
// TODO: fix sig
I'm playing a public domain tune on the world's smallest violin...
"In a letter scheduled to be delivered to Google Monday..."
Did anyone else think that Google Monday read this as this was another 'Google Labs' idea? Can't imagine what 'Google Monday' would provide, but still, it's not unreasonable. I remember when everything was being renamed Yahoo*
bo
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
The university presses depend on books sales and other licensing agreements for most of their revenue, making copyright protections essential to their survival.
I don't think anyone who has been through college is going to feel bad for these guys.
This is the same industry that comes out with a new edition of a book every single year so that your resell value is zero. And if you look, editions 5 and 6 only differ by having different problems in them - the text is virtually unchanged. They just keep pumping out editions every year to make a revenue stream. It's blatant, and for some reason nobody cares.
And it's also a virtual monopoly - these big-book companies are no better behaved than any other monopoly you can name. A good example is the big name bookstore on my campus that fought a legal battle to keep the required book list secret, so that mom and pop bookstores wouldn't know what books to buy, making their competition effectively zero.
They eventually lost, but the fact is they tried. I feel no remorse for any hard times these jerks may be feeling. Here's hoping PDF replaces them all someday.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
but can you bring it to the washroom?
The key is the "small snippets" and how they're given out. TFA didn't say, but I suspect that the questions that they sent to Google concern how Google is going to keep people from coercing Google into giving them the whole book a piece at a time.
It's been done before; some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were first released because somebody reverse-engineered a concordance. One could imagine somebody writing software to pull up part of a book, then search on the last sentenece of each snippet to get it to reveal some more (as context). Repeat and get the whole book.
It might not be all that simple or all that effective, but publishers do have a right to worry about the possibility. It takes a lot of work to publish a book, and it would be nice if Google were able to give them some assurance that it wouldn't become common for people to get the books for free.
Even without that, even publishing small snippets of reference books can be problematic. Sometimes you only want a short snippet of the book at a time, and the rest of the book goes unused. The publisher spends money assembling the whole book, so they want you to pay for all of it (amortizing the cost), or at least use the library's copy (which can be very expensive if they expect to sell only to libraries).
Personally, I'd like to see Google honor a publisher's request not to index a book, the same way google honors the robots.txt file. If they're losing sales that they might otherwise get via Google's free advertising, that's their own lookout.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
.. but I'm too lazy to read all the posts.
After Safari Books online, I bought more books. After iTunes music store, I bought more CDs. Not out of charity, but additional interest.
The texts are available search-only. It's a f'in product catalog for God's sake! You can't read the entire journal online, just find the one that you need to buy!! How much do you want to bet that the publishers heard "digital copy" and panicked before reading (or thinking) any further?
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
I wish we had a search engine that specifically had people removing spam and garbage, and hits that were misclassified.
Google could collapse under its own weight. They are moving into so many different directions, and I doubt they will do all very well. They should stick with the food on their plate before ordering more. There eyes are getting to big for their stomachs.
Fix your search engine first. Remove spam. Let the quality links get the highest ranking. They have power to shape the internet.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
If copyrights holders had their way, there would be no libraries. Libraries usually buy one copy of a book and let multiple read it without paying additional royalties to the copyright holder. It is only through the Doctrine of First Sale that libraries are even allowed to do this. Although some academic publishers do make much of their money selling books to libraries, there has always been a somewhat conflicting relationship between libraries and book sellers, who would rather sell lots of copies to individuals than a few to libraries.
Consider the literature involved here. These are scientific works which are probably used more or less as reference material. This isn't a Tom Clancy novel which you sit down and read for hours. This is: "What is a good numerical technique to solve this stiff set of odes?" From an end user perspective, having these books in digital formate is ideal.
-- john
But I'm not. Google is only cutting into their variable costs, not their fixed costs. These businesses still have to pay rent, salaries for the editors, and the cost for the equipment they use to make these books. If google takes away enough sales, then they will fall below the break even point and will have to shut down (they won't be able to pay editors, or replace their equipment when it breaks down). No more sales, and they won't be able to publish any new books.
Of course, as I've stated elsewhere, we aren't allowed to dictate other business's plans. If they have property (copyrights) it is up to them to decide how to use it. So, google plans better include limiting the search results to "fair use" type exerpts.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Fortunately, most standards bodies got reality: charging outrageous fees for copies of their publications was horribly cost-ineffective for the industries that they supposedly served; there are other ways to raise those relatively small sums.
Today most standards documents are available online for free. The standards bodies seem to have survived the change. Maybe it's time for academic publishing to do the same.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Finally we get a decent sized company that's mass publishing simple, stripped down information without all the bloat. I love it.
I hope the other large publishers follow suit quickly.
"...making copyright protections essential to their survival.""
That is so wrong. Copyright has nothing to do with their survival as it has not played a real role in publishing profits for centuries(expect for betwixt publishers). Libraries have always provided copyrighted materials to the public free of charge to a limited use. The publishers have relied upon the library as being too bothersome, too far away, too hard to use, etc for their survival. Most people would rather order a book than sift through their local library to try to garner the same material or item. Publishers have depended on that, not the copyright, as books have always been free for the asking.
Now Google is poised to remove a significant portion of the 'library hurdle' that stops most people from using that resource before their local Barnes and Noble retail outlet. That is what they are upset over, not the copyright. The copyright is the only legal paper the have to hang onto and cry into. Therefore they try to raise your ire over that and hope you will miss the real point.
Do you really know anyone that steals books? Do you know anyone who downloads books illegally? Doesn't that sound a bit proposeterous when the same material can be had in an hour or two from your local library? It sure does to me.
As information moves to the electronic format, as most all of it will in the coming years, are we ready and or willing to lose our access to published materials freely? Will information truely become a comodity for the wealthy only too? Shame on the publishers for clouding the issue in such a way. We are not the dumb (are we?).
There should indeed be choice by the author. These academic publications generally prohibit the author from making any other choice than assigning copyright to them, effectively tying the spread of knowledge to the financial interests of the publication.
The point is moot. Google is only going to offer those works that are out of copyright (70 years after the death of the author I *think*) so no one should be making money off them in the first place.
What's the goal here?
Getting the information out or profiting via control of information?
You'd think that searchable electronic versions of the journals would further the goals that led to researching and writing the papers in the first place. The peer review portion costs nothing, the cost of production of the papers is not borne by the journals. They don't sponsor(in the sense of paying for) the conferences.
All that said, I think most people prefer a hard copy of a paper that they will be using in their research. I know I do. So the journals should still have an audience.
The problem is that the way it's set up now, one must either wait forever for an interlibrary loan or buy the reprints. This impedes research as one must spend a lot of time-money to weed through all the stuff that's not important to ones research in order to uncover 'the good stuff'. Sure, one can join a professional society for a 'discount' on the journals, but this is of no use when one is interested in cross discipline research. The time-money is better spent on actual reading and research than on acquiring tons of paper.
The journals are only delaying the inevetable anyway. On line, peer reviewed, publication is going to happen eventually. It's faster and more people will be able to make use of each others research. Better the journals 'get in on the ground floor' before they become irrelevant(sp?).
RANT Follows
Of course we see control of information on the internet as well. The most frustrating is this assymetrical bandwidth crap that is being used to keep independent producers in their place. Sure, someone can pay for bandwidth for the equivilent of broadcast, i.e. a big fat web server farm, but this is money and time taken away from production (just like the journals above). With symmetrical broadband, distributed distribution of content becomes a reality for music, films, and even computing. i.e. AI or heaven forbid, a distributed google work-a-like. This is the real fight because distributed distribution will eventually make ALL of broadcast irrelevant, including google.
Make universities, and other research corporations, pay for subscriptions to these copyright-dependent journals. Universities make profits from those journals - tuition, corporate R&D, patented research, etc. They should pay their share to support them - if they lose the journals, their profitmaking will be impaired.
--
make install -not war
non-profit means that all profits go right back into the business. they can, in fact must, expand their business. The non-profit part means that their are no owners or CEO's that get more money if the business makes more money. All the money goes back into the services that the company provides. if non-profits weren't allowed to expand, then OSDL's recent announcement that they are going to expand operations in Europe and Asia would be a violation of the law.
my pet machine
i thought they were only putting up books that didnt have authors because they were dead and their copyrights ran out in the 1920s or something. those non-profit companies are also third parties, what gives them the right to hoard great literary art?
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
Isn't it comforting to know that our cultural addictions have reached such a fevered pitch that even non-profit organizations scream about lost revenue when confronted with something that can help people in their field for no appreciable cost to anyone?
I guess the original point of non-profits existing (helping a cause without having to obsess about the money side) went out of style once people heard it gives you tax breaks. I feel better now that non-profit is just another kind of startup that will attack anything that benefits the people at their expense.
I'm glad that they can pay salaries to their workers and themselves just like a normal corporation while I pick up their tax slack. I'm glad they can whine because they'll lose money if their cause is actually fulfilled by someone else and the government will actually step in to put a stop to that obvious injustice.
It's also nice to know that giving and helping people without getting literal cash in return is unthinkably un-American communist terrorism. I sure was getting sick of all that "Love thy brother, share and share alike" BS. Hoarding and expecting people to pay me for everything I (or they) do is much more fun.
All Hail the Maggott Show
I believe that Google originally planned to begin this work with public domain works, which I think would be great. I'd love to see this model work with content that is uncontestably free, then move it into the domain of copy-protected works.
As a music teacher, I've been collecting public domain music texts so that I can build open-source music materials that my students can use, including songs that they can have and keep, etc. They love that everything I give them I compose or derive from a free source. It is time-consuming finding print and online copies of these works, and it will be wonderful once there is a way to centrally find them.
Go Google!
Companies who cry for help when someone makes them obsolete deserve to be made obsolete. I am looking forward to correlating my internet research with hard text works without having to go to the library.
All libraries are not funded equally, and an alternative to driving downtown to my local University library is welcome. If the whole work was going to be posted in it's entirety I could see a legitimate gripe, but if only parts relevant to the search come up, that sounds fine. It may just DRUM UP interest.
This issue will become a serious problem when lightweight, foldable screens become ubiquitous. Portability is the one thing that books and print media have going for it. When digital text media readers become really light and unobtrusive is when I will never look back. Books will go the way of Vinyl, you'll have some hardcore fans, but the mainstream will leave it behind.
Then get ready for printers, typesetters, and Lumberjacks to all cry foul.
There's a serious problem here in inviting publishers to submit their material. Publishers seem eager to submit their reprints -- for which they only have copyright over the book's design -- of public domain works. As a result, completely free works are listed in Google Print as "Copyrighted Material" -- in turn, allowing the publisher to misappropriate copyright w/in G. Print over written material they do not have copyright over.
See, for example, The Canterbury Tales in Google Print. This was written in the 1300s. I would very much like to see Penguin's proof of copyright over the works of Chaucer, who died in 1400.
Likewise, see Romeo and Juliet , written by Shakespeare, who died in 1616. Or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , first published in 1819. Clearly no present-day entity has copyright over any of these works. Regardless, the publishers who have submitted their versions of them are able to enforce a 3-page-view limit on them without legal right to do so.
Google Print should be scrapped, and instead, the spotlight shined on Project Gutenberg.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Q: Who said that Google was giving away free copies of books?
A: Nobody!
I believe what they intend to do is:
Google isn't some magic fairy company that is above copyright law, and Google isn't dumb either. This is probably just another example of an idiot scared of a disruptive technology crying wolf. Google's new feature will probably just bolster book sales for these folks in the long run (and the short run too!).
Yeah, this makes me wish Google were a non-profit organization. Their services are becoming so much part of the infrastructure of the Internet that they ought not to be tied to commercial interests at all.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Not necessarily. It could be automated, and once somebody wrote the software it could just rip the book out of Google for free. Writing software is hard, but people seem to like writing software and giving it away. So it would be neither hard nor expensive for you to get a book that way.
Information wants to be free.
That is because, usually, the author is selling his/her license to the publishers who provide the upfront money to produce the books/pay the author. If the author produced the books on his own, he would have more of a say, but since he is essentially a paid contractor he has less of a say. It is a trade off...and one made willingly. Authors do not have the same excuse as some people give to musicians - authors I would expect are a bit smarter and can read their contracts.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
RTFA--this action is being taken to protect "nonprofit publishers of academic journals and scholarly books," not whoever the fuck wrote the Ya-Ya Sisterhood book. Academics don't subscribe to journals or buy monographs because their cousin or some internet nerd tells them it "changed their life;" they buy them because they know it will contain research important to their field. Original scholarship is costly and time-consuming to produce, and by its nature serves a very small market. A few lost sales can make a big difference. Those who publish it have the right -- indeed, the obligation -- to protect their own investment and the rights of their authors.
the ambitious project will violate copyrights and stifle future sales
Errr... shouldn't that be "stifling the flow of knowledge," the basic reason for printing books? Oh, wait, Google is helping that.
I agree!
Please, whatever you do, don't click on any links to my novel. Whatever you do, dont read it online! Oh, the humanity! (and I say this as one who has been published, and is well on the way toward doing so again).
Has no one considered that Google will be allowing word and phrase searches in books, but won't necessarilly be providing the full text online? I suspect that is the case (I really can't see google wrecking their business by engaging in wholesale, deliberate copyright infringement), and that will drive more sales, not less.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
why? if the work being 'published' is either not copyrighted or public domain, why should they pay?
If someone sees his business model threatened by that, well, time to think of a new way to make money.
You can't stop this kind of thing (which would significantly facilitate access to information and benefit society in many ways) just because it hurts someone's sales.
As someone said before, where would we be now if the pony express had managed to outlaw the telegraph because it 'hurt' its sales?
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
because most of us don't want the govt to piss away 50% or more of our earnings on stupid shit.
I can spend my money better then the government.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
Specifically, look up profit and revenue. It's possible to have the latter without having the former. Heck, you can even have revenue while having a loss!
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Only the most successful authors get to set their own terms. Authors pretty much hand over not just a wide range of rights, but exclusivity as well.
The publishing world lost all credibility with me when they tried to fight the sale of used books, because they said they didn't get any royalties from the sale. No shit, really? :-)
Please help metamoderate.
Oh? Their survival depends on copyright, this coming from university publishers.
My wallet's survival also depends on these bunch on people. Often I have to suck it up and take it to buy their crappy books, and I sure wouldn't mind having them available through Google Library.
However, I have yet to find an elegant solution to read e-books, so I do buy books worthy to be kept, whether it was course books or books of interest.
Google Library would serve as a check against crappy books and needless revisions - if they'd like to stay in business, they'd have to make their readers want to buy them
All we need is another group to join the crybabies at the MPAA and the RIAA.
Too bad this one is backwards: Association of American University Presses (AAUP)
Who wants to read a whole book online anyways. If you really want the true quality and content, you will buy it. Just like a DVD. Sure you can download it, but you don't get the fancy case with all the BS literature inside.
Not to mention that Google sells nice targeted ads, such that if you like what you read, a few clicks will let you order the book. Perhaps it would generate more sales? The only contention is that they are scanning the entire work, and they are afraid that people will be able to get the whole thing for free. Google should be able to quell these fears.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
If the academic presses were more progressive, they'd be collaborating with Google instead of fighting it.
One of the issues with using digital sources in research is verifying authenticity.
Imagine that after Google's search engine helps find the academic research you're looking for, you can make a small payment to have a digitally signed excerpt downloaded for local viewing or printing. The digital signature verifies that the content has not been altered anywhere during transmission, that it accurately reflects the original research.
The combination of convenience (excerpting just what you need, and being able to find it quickly) plus authenticity would be a boon to research and a potentially much larger revenue stream to the universities than hardcopy publishing, without restricting the openness of research.
From "about Google Print"
appear to me to define the term "fair use". Scholarly research is/one of the first uses carved out for fair use in the first place.
However, uneversity presses are generally non-profit organizations, so they generally price their materials to cover the costs associated with producing, storing and distributing them.
If the materials are available free online, then all those costs are eliminated.
If someone still wants a nicely bound hardcopy, then that person has the choice of getting one printed at a local print shop. The university press can also offer on demand printing for a cost covering fee.
I guess I don't understand their objection to having their materials available without any work required from them.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
For the sake of open information and a climate of "I want information now so make it available electronically and let me search for it", some businesses and business model might have to go the way of the dodo. So be it.
I just wish the RIAA and MPAA were already extinct.
Indeed. And that, as I've pointed out here before amid cries of trolling, does make legal justification for other Google features -- Google Cache in particular, but also Google Groups and potentially things like Google Image Search -- uncertain at best.
If anything, it sounds like this project would be on much safer legal ground, as long as (a) they really are only reproducing content that's no longer covered by copyright, and (b) they pay suitable licensing fees for all the material they transfer to their database that's still covered by copyright.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I suspect the biggest concern publishers would have is that by doing this, Google is making the public domain far more accessible on a wider scale. People will start to see why it is useful.
Furthermore, some publishers depend on selling public domain works as a large portion of their product line.
SSL Certificate
I was under the impression that Google was planning to scan books that where quite old already ( thus no copyright issues here ) and quite hard to find, something like Newton's Principia or so. I believe that this is a very interesting move, although i hate to read long texts from my computer and i hate printing them as well so i would definitely go for the printed version. Anyway...
What most of the people are saying is that who needs publishing houses etc etc but the truth is that these books wouldn't be available in the first place if the publishing houses were not there. As far as technical textbooks are concerned the cost of the god damn book isn't only the paper, have you ever tried to typeset a mathematical text with LaTeX? It takes AGES, really... And not to mention that these books aren't really Da Vinci's Code. As a postgraduate student myself, I have paid around $2,000 for books up to now and i don't think that a single penny was wasted. You have to see your books as an investment, a cab driver pays for the cab's license and the car, a musician for the instrument and a scientist for his books.
As far as new editions are concerned, you probably haven't studied your books at all. All books have typos or getting outdated or need a little bit of "lifting" here and there, remove a few pages that were not very well written, add a new chapter for this new cool trend in science and so on. There is a reason for a publisher to print a new edition otherwise they would just do reprints. Someone mentioned that there is no reason to have the 7th edition of a calculus book since calculus hasn't changed much during the last century... Maybe the idea is the same but the approach might have changed, or the way to teach things or even the notation. Many people are experts in quantum mechanics nowadays but Dirac's first paper seems incomprehensible, even to professors.
Anyway, Google is nice, their idea about scanning rare books and making available online is cool etc and i like computers yes but please do not oversimplify things.
Best.
How is this google work going to be different from Amazon's scanned, searchable books on-line? The books are also copyrighted, and Amazon plaster's that fact all over the page image...
Look I feel for the publishers but why is it google's problem if it threatens their businuess model. If that was the case we would still have horse and buggy because henery ford was threating their model. Adapt or Die.
I can understand publishers' concern regarding an outside party scanning and indexing their works, but if they are serious about maintaining control, they must be ready to provide these services themselves. If they can provide a unified index of information that provides value, consumers will pay for that service.
As an example, the ACM Technical Library is a great resource. It has a good facility that allows you to search the contents of all ACM publications, and allows access to abstracts of all works online. With a subscription, you have access to the complete works. I'm happy to pay $99/year for that service as it provides quick access to high quality information.
If publishers are not willing to step up and provide services that the consumers desire, it seems only logical that a forward thinking third party should be able to step into that void.
Just 2-cents.
It defies logic to deny that people who make money selling books will not be harmed if someone else provides free copies of those books.
I don't know about you, but I hate reading anything over a few pages online. Who wants to read an entire book on computer? Not many people I'd imagine. Printed books are far superior technology to the electronic kind.
The publishers should sue Google and Google should be required to pay the publishers each time a publication is accessed via Google.
Unless of course Google only provides short 1 or 2 page excert of a copyrighted book. Google then sells "buy this book" links to booksellers. Everyone wins. This seems far more likely than Google making the entire book available online. Obviously that's breaking copyright law.
AccountKiller
The problem with textbooks is that i know i've been coerced into buying books because i need one set of questions off of one page for a course.
If i could have looked at 3 pages online then i'm sure i could have at least avoided one or two books.
The sad fact is that textbooks are a bit like albums. Most have a few interesting bits, but it's mostly filler to make it 700 pages thick and justify the price. It's rare to find an entirely useful textbook.
Exactly. The author should have the choice, not the publisher. These publishing contracts which tie publication to assignation of copyright to a profit-making institution undermine the author's right to choose.
violate copyrights and stifle future sales
If it works like now, you'll be able to read just a few pages out of the book so it's not exactly that a hacker could make a script to automatically grab entire books from their index or anything. They simply only have maybe 10-20 pages per book.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
That doesn't mean in a wharehouse somewhere either.
A large proportion of books get a run of 1k or 2k volumes and 'dissapear' from the bookstore shelves within a year of two from being published.
Its simply isn't worth it to the book stores.
The books end their lives mouldering away in the remainder bins of 'discount book' stores and Salvation Army rummage sales (and don't earn another dime for the publishers.)
I've got some books that I've been looking for for years and won't find anywhere for any amount of money.
And that's just because of the storage costs, never mind that they aren't printed on acid free paper and are currently disappearing into 'slow smoke.'
I regret to state that the book publishers are trying to create a new revenue stream from nothing because they didn't care to do so before.
Screw 'em!
Let 'em lose the rights to scan ALL books that they can't be bothered to keep on the shelves.
Let 'em be forced to sell the rights to ALL the books that they can't be bothered to keep up to date.
Have you bought some school books lately?
They cost a nickle less than photo-copying the entire book would at the for-profit school copier.
They keep coming out with new 'editions' for accounting books and, man do they CHARGE!. Over a hundred bucks for an HR Management book and you can't use last years! (Like ALL of the laws governing HR ahd changed. Pshaw...)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Being able to read a contract doesn't help when they all say "We own you". It's an industry standard contract and they like it that way.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Doctorow's assertion, of course, is entirely anecdotal. Where are the numbers that might substantiate it?
Reminds me of an "anecdotal proof" that I like to use to confuse people who think that anecdotes can't prove anything.
Hereabouts there are a number of "tech" bookstores, mostly at colleges but not entirely. If you walk in, the first thing you see is the display of the current tech bestsellers. A quick check will verify that almost all of these are available online, usually in PDF form, and most of the downloads are free. But there the hard copy is, sitting in the display that's reserved for bestsellers.
It's even worse: If you open the books, most of they have a foreword that tells you about the online download. Most give the URL.
So how can the sales possibly be nonzero? They're being given away free, and they tell you right up front that you can get them free. But people walk into the bookstores and buy them. Are these people idiots? Given the usual clientele of these stores, I'd guess not.
Now, I'll point out that this is in fact "just another anecdote". I haven't given any numbers. I haven't said anything that would prove that there are any sales at all.
But these books wouldn't be on those particular shelves unless the people running the store thought that they'd sell. Some of these stores have been there for years. The people running them aren't idiots. They are successful businessmen making the judgement that these books are good ones to display up front.
So here we have rather convincing "anecdotal evidence" that giving things away free doesn't necessarily kill sales. It may well be helping sales (but that's really hard to infer from anecdotes).
Actually, I also wonder if there are real numbers on the topic. I haven't yet seen any that I trust. But seeing things being listed as bestsellers when they're available free online is sorta convincing that something funny is going on here.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The author DOES have a choice.
He chooses to sell his rights to the publisher.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
$80+ for a 200-300 page book that gets printed for $5.00 a copy...and you have to buy that book because the professor wrote it specifically for this class...
F-U...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Check out the Baen Free Library sometime. Especially Prime Palaver #6. Wherein Eric Flint (who makes his money by selling books) shows how the Free Library has helped make him money.
Yet more anecdotal evidence - I had never considered buying anything by Eric Flint until I read some of his works in the Free Library. I now have 10 or 12 of his books in Dead-Tree format, and most of those in bought and paid for e-book format as well. Same for several other authors in the Free Library.
And not one of those 30-odd books would I have bought if the Free Library had not been giving away books....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"Doctorow's assertion, of course, is entirely anecdotal. Where are the numbers that might substantiate it?"
Baen free library has some pretty solid numbers to substantiate that. They've seen clear increases in the sales of books which are available for free (both compared to similar books which aren't available online, and compared to the sales of that same book before online distribution)
The question is, what you do with it afterwards. Google is letting people look at less that they can see in a bookstore. The only difference is that we have a lot more tools when we're home for taking notes, etc.
If you want to read the whole work, you pay for a copy. Google has protections against reading "the next four pages" and so on.
FIRST they bitch that the Google Library project is too US-centric. Then, when Google News aggregates some stories, a French news agency SUES them for copyright infringement.
You're not paying attention to us! Oh, good, you are. Now we'll sue you!
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
*sarcasm* Let's see, I go to the campus bookstore and purchase a text that's required for a class. What?!?! $100 for a text on ordinary differential equations? Surely, the study of ODE hasn't changed much in say the last 30 years, but my professor insists that we use this specific edition and there aren't any in the USED bin. Oh wait, I see...my professor is a contributing author...
And even if the book is available in the used bin, it costs 75% of the new price. Some hapless student is going to pay that, open the book a few times over the course of a semester and then resell it back to the bookstore at 15% of what he/she paid for it...only to see it back for sale a few days later at 75% of the cover price again.
Rinse and repeat...until, of course, another edition of the book is published with a new forward and some extremely minor content changes and the cycle starts anew (without the availability of a USED alternative for one semester)....I think the publishers are getting upset with the wrong people. And students are just getting the shaft.
Before Gutenberg (the German, not the project), it was not possible to make money publishing books. After the Internet, the same has become true. The window has closed.
Many business models are only viable for a certain time period. Just like blacksmiths and candlemakers, the publishing industry is likely to survive only as a shadow of its former self.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
The "fundamental human right to free speech"
a. Is not very fundamental either historically or geographically.
b. Has to do with the right to express ideas unpopular to people in power, and virtually nothing to do with profanity, pornography, or use of others' ideas.
Freedom of expression is neither a fundamental right, nor closely related to freedon of speech.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
tree version before I would even finish the e-version.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to read books off-line i.e. reading from print rather than from screen (one reason being that a PC is a bit inconvenient to read in bed or the bath ;)
Also, if I decided to print out an electronic book from my PC for off-line consumption, for all of the paper, printer toner and *time* that I use doing this (think HP Deskjet;), I might as well buy the real thing nicely printed and bound.
The publishers needn't be as concerned as they are. A PC will never replace a book (at least not until they invent something as mobile as paper.)
...be damned!
"I hope they legalize drugs so you hurry up and fucking die." Charles Bronson (the band, not the man)
*blah blah blah* our business model is obsolete *blah blah blah blah*
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
"The project also has drawn criticism in Europe for placing too much emphasis on material from the United States."
In other words, some Europeans are insisting that a US company has to do this for European content because they don't want to do it themselves?
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
That is because, usually, the author is selling his/her license to the publishers who provide the upfront money to produce the books/pay the author.
At least with peer-reviewed journals, that does not hold true. The author usually has to actually pay to have their submissions printed in such publications.
For textbooks, it depends. For few-author textbooks, the author makes a few bucks, so your argument holds. For the sort of textbooks with dozens of authors, in some cases the authors don't even know they have their name attached to the book, and those who do usually get "non-financial compensation" only, ie, no cash but they can list the book on their CV as a publication.
Don't mistake the world of academic publishing for the "real" world of publishing. Academics publish for fame, not fortune, and the leeches that do the physical printing get to rob both ends of the process (thus the massive interest in purely on-line peer-reviewed journals, with a massive backlash by traditional journal publishers such as Elsevier).
"If a publisher has a copyright, but decides that a work should not be in print - it is effectively censored."
I shudder to think that the idea has occured to Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaw(?sp) or any other of the Luddites out there who try to suppress information.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Being able to read a contract doesn't help when they all say "We own you". It's an industry standard contract ...
True in general, but there are some interesting exceptions in academia.
For example, last year the publishers of Nature changed their copyright rules. They now require that the authors retain copyright of anything published in Nature (and require a contract stating that the copyright can't be assigned without Nature's permission, preventing heavy-handed university admins from demanding the copyright after publication).
They have announced that they are returning the copyright of all previously-published papers to the original authors.
They also stated that papers published in Nature can be put online, but only on sites that give the authors complete control over the paper's files. In fact, they actively encourage putting your papers online, six months after publication. They also strongly encourage making all original data available online, unless there's a good technical reason that it can't be done. Information on obtaining physical materials (such as biological samples) should also be available.
This is significant in a number of fields for which Nature is the top-status publication. If you've accepted research money that requires giving the copyright to the funding agency, you can no longer get your results published in Nature. If your institution claims the copyright on your work, you can't be published in Nature.
Their stated goals were that published authors should retain the rights to their own work, and that others should be able to build on your published results.
There is serious discussion going on in academia about forcing other publishers to adopt a similar policy. This may not be possible with for-profit publishers. But many publications are produced by professional societies that are controlled by their members. There's a good chance that they will all soon adopt similar rules.
Loss of control of your own work is a growing scandal in much of academia. But people are figuring out that they just might have the power to fix the problem. After all, if Nature can do it, why can't every other academic society?
(It'll be interesting to see if Nature maintains these policies)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
BTW, you omitted shipping costs, storage costs, costs associated with retail operations (buildings, space, more employees), and disposal costs when they make room for "2 + 2 = 4, Vol 22".
All of which are eliminated using electronic distribution.
Publishing electronically also eliminates things like lead time (the time between finishing the text, and it being delivered to the student), meaning that they have more time to work on the text.
Ultimately, it means that the publishers have much lower costs, and students have more affordable texts.
IMO, the reason this non-profit wants to protect its copyrights has nothing to do with losing money, and a lot more to do with losing prestige and influence.
I'm not a huge book fan or anything, I actually love computers, but come on!
I like the fact that I don't have to worry about a book running out of batteries or recharging it.
The display never gives me a headache (reading small, lit displays in the dark sometimes does)
If I'm on a page that I know I will want to get back to, I can stick my finger between the sheets. For longer storage, I can place the bookmark there.
If I want to reference a previous event, I can usually flip to it within seconds.
I have a great indexing system called a bookshelf. I don't have to remember which CD I put it on or if canceling my audible account will make that book go away for the rest of my life (Well, that's for audible books, but I'm sure the same applies to any DRM controled media).
I can set it down on it's face to save the place if I have to jump up, and if I don't get to come back for a few days, it'll still be there.
None of these break me out of the character I'm living through the book.
You know, honestly, this excersize is kind of pointless because I can't come up with a single reason to read a book online. I even print out source code to read when I really want to think about it/mark it up. Why would I do that if paper wasn't a superior medium?
In ever peer-reviewed journal I've ever published in, page charges are always optional. Along with the copyright form that gives the journal permission to reproduce the author's work, the page charge form allows the author to decline -- no questions asked -- the page charge fee.
It's fair use. The part about making a profit has no legal important, and very little ethical important.
Google doesn't make the books available for free. They just are willing to search them and give you a piece(see fair use) for free. The concern is that someone could trick google into handing over entire volumes with the right scripts. Although these sorts of scripts are easily thwarted.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
here's why i buy those books even though they're free (and often, especially because they're free):
i use those technical books as a reference. i search them in two very different ways; were they to make them paper-only, i would lose one of those methods of searching.
1) searching by flipping through pages. no matter how advanced ebooks get, flipping through paper pages looking for a particular concept will always be easier.
2) the almighty google. no matter how nice physical paper is, google will always find that keyword faster, and google's site: modifier does a fantastic job of enabling this.
oh yeah, and besides that, the technical books one sticks in their cube's bookshelf is often sort of like a geek version of a pissing contest. "i have cooler tech books than you!" "why don't you have the GOF book on your shelf? i thought all decent programmers had it." etc.
What I'm saying here is, think about the percentage of people in the world who can actually use a computer competently. I'm pretty sure, like said among the other comments, that most of the world will continue to buy these books regardless.
Sometimes I comment just to hear myself typing.
And they should! Books were written with that kind of experience in mind. Next time your wife reads an old classic, remind her that it probably was written in parchment or papyrus, and that's the way they should be read. Damn, old books weren't meant to have pages turned, they were meant to be *scrolled*! Or maybe they were written in cuneiform tablets?
Copyright on works created by corporations does indeed last 95 years. However, works created by human authors are protected by copyright for the life of the author + 70 years, which is potentially far longer.
And for many classes of works, the number of works that fall under "work made for hire" greatly exceeds the number that don't.
Where is the problem?
If Google cuts their publishing expenses to essentially zero, this is a good thing, right?
Non-profit orgs usually don't exist to keep a few (paid) people employed: they are usually (supposedly) trying to accomplish some worthy goal.
Google is going to help them.
..these dang newfangled Cars are taking away our business. And when everyone drives cars, who will shoe your horses then?
Unless I read this incorrectly, this goes completely against what copyrights were intended for. Copyrights were not about ensuring that the creator wuld make money, but instead that the legal monopoly they provide will encourage them to create and be creative, and/or bring further reasearch and information public. With copyrights lasting beyond what is needed, sometimes for 100yrs+ easily now, and the fact that people now care more about using copyrights for financial gain instead, we can say goodbye to conventional copyrights... for now.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
We do not want any confusion with Alcoholics Anonymous.
I am in graduate school and when my boss says 'hey, read this book' i have to drop about 100 bucks on a book.. that is, if Dover publishing hasn't made an older text on the subject available for 12 dollars instead of 112 dollars.
I dont think that google providing free access for books is the solution, but i KNOW that paying some university publishing company 100 bucks for a book that i might read once isn't the awnser.
"So why should a for-profit company (Google) do so without paying the people who they are copying from?"
Oh, I don't know, because they're not shilling all over Slashdot as the spokesperson for the American Publishers Association, otherwise known as the assholes who would shut down libraries in a moment if they thought it would fly.
You know, in looking at your post history, it's interesting that you don't mention One. Single. Word. about any of the following:
* Actually addressing what Google will be doing, because it sure as shit isn't what you're trolling on about.
* The fact that many of the works that Google is copying from are public domain works, or do you expect modern publishers to be paid for works that have in the public domain for centuries? Sweet Jesus, how will Chaucer feed his family!?
* You mention choice, which would be appropriate for an APA Spokesperson. To be published, non-bestselling authors have absolutely no choice about the contract that is put in front of them. If they don't take it and their $.50-$1 per copy sold, they don't get published. Frankly, I believe you couldn't care less about the authors based on your posting history.
* You repeatedly deride Google for making a profit from the public domain or by using Fair Use towards copyrighted works. So far, you haven't actually demonstrated which parts of Google's service are breaking the 4-part rule of literary Fair Use.
Not sure how true this is, but I was told that you are allowed to reproduce part of a work of non-fiction in the UK. This is what allows for quotations and things. It was a certain fraction of the total work, I think it was as long as it was less than one third of the total number of characters, or something similar. Photocopied it in front of the librarian anyways. In my experience of academic quotations from recognised publications, it is usually solely there for the purpose of having a clever looking quotation from a recognised publication. It doesnt matter if the quote supports the point in its original context, as long as the bibliography makes the piece look well reasearched and smart. These people dont read the books, or even take the arguament in, they have already made their mind up. Some of the most closed minded people I have met have been academics. I also met someone who collected hardback edditions of the fattest smartest sounding books he could, just to have a good looking bookcase full of smart books (It did look rather good though). He had never read a single one of them. The spines of each and everyone was in immaculate condition, but he must have spent upwards of £300 on the massive mahogany case alone. I dread to think of the ammount he spent on the books.
The issue is simple: If I'm a publisher, I sell my journal or book to 10,000 libraries. If Google indexes it for free access, none of those libraries need to buy my journal or book, because the people who need them have free access.
It isn't the reader who purchases from big publishing houses, it's the academic institution. Google undercuts this financial strategy.
If a work isn't under copyright, then Google owes no one.
The Pony Express and telegraph analogy is misguided. We're talking about unauthorized distribution of products, not different ways of transmitting information.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I don't know enough about the industry to offer any suggestions. My opinion is that the money that IP holder SIGs like the RIAA are spending on legal fights, copy-protection schemes, and DRM technology is mostly going to waste. There is a fundamental problem with these efforts: they are trying to prevent digital copyright infringement. The problem is that the nature of the intellectual property they hold is mutually exclusive with preventing duplication. If a media can be played back, it can be recorded and duplicated. The only copy-protection scheme that will work is one which prevents the media from played back at all. And nobody is likely to buy a CD or DVD that cannot be played back.
The only barrier to digitization of the media is the energy barrier, and this barrier continuously shrinks. Bypassing copy protection, even if to exercise your rights under the Fair Use doctrine, has already been criminalized in US legal code by the DMCA. This, obviously, hasn't stopped anybody, so I'm puzzled by the rationale (on the part of the industry) that further legislation will prove any more effective.
I think the best answer is a massive paradigm shift in the distribution model, pricing system, and profit model of the industry. They also need to undergo a major intellectual shift away from presuming the criminal intent of their customers and towards respecting their consumer rights. This is risky business. It's naive to think that people will pay for anything if they don't have to. Despite the personal anecdotes that are recited ad nauseum on Slashdot about how everybody tries-and-deletes or tries-and-buys (and so do all of our friends), the industry as well as third party statisticians have conducted numerous studies and consumer polls that demonstrate rather convincingly that piracy does have a measurable, non-trivial, negative impact on the revenue steam of the industry.
The industry has been unsuccessful in stemming this tide, their future efforts are focused on hardware solutions combined with legislation (also doomed to fail), as well as threats of legal action, publicity campaigns that appeal to emotion, and probably other slippery slopes that I'm not aware of. None of these are likely to work either.
There's just no simple answer. Some of the member organizations of the RIAA are owned by (or themselves are owners of) hardware divisions that manufacture playback devices. Who wins? The publishing division and it's threatened revneue steam, or the hardware line, whose managers don't wish to be forced via US legislation to start producing crippled devices that people don't want.
The whole thing is a big mess, and it's one of the cases where they're trying to shut the barn door after the cows have all run out. It's too late. Their only choice is to embrace the new frontier and start figuring out, soon, how to profit within its rules.
Sounds like the "good people" are simply going to complain about being caught in the middle, and yell at those exercising "self-defense" instead of exercising social pressure on those "bad people".
We have a problem right now where the good people haven't yet reached the point where they'll acknowledge that the bad people even exist in any significant quantity. Just look at Slashdot, a community of mostly knowledgable people, who still can't figure out that the behavior of themselves and their pool of social contacts is not necessarily representative of the behavior of all of society. If it was, George Bush wouldn't be the President. We have to start with admitting that people do pirate and it's a problem. Once that's done, the social pressure you suggest could be applied. I doubt it'll be successful, however, because frankly, I think most of the downloaders really do just want free music and could give two shits about how legal it is as long as the chances of being caught are miniscule.
If you shoplift one CD, you'll be escorted out of the store an
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
I agree; I would never read a book displayed on any kind of monitor screen.
If Google simply displays a tiny excerpt and then offers a "buy" link, you're right: everyone wins. That, I believe, would not break copyright law. But, since the copyright law is not a decision tree , a publisher might still sue in order to obtain a court ruling.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Yes, no one should be making money selling nice hardcovers of Shakespeare... Wait, why not?! They provide a good service. Of course (good) public domain book publishers they aren't scared by online versions.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
>> here we have rather convincing "anecdotal evidence" that giving things away free doesn't necessarily kill sales...
I didn't say giving things away would "kill" sales. I said, in effect, that it would hurt sales.
More to the point, the only people who have the right to sell or give away a book are people to whom the author has licensed that right.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Why should I buy a book when I can go to the library and check it out and read it. ( perhaps we should make libraries illegal since they stomp on some peoples business modle). What we should have is electronic libraries with every book ever published in them. ( you can't make a copy only read it.) But currently our social structures for getting people paid to do the work of creating all those nice books have not kept up with our technology.
For the record I am not a supporter of laws that shore up business modles that are in need of being replaced.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Information is power. He who controls information controls the scociety.
Either way: this should be handled under the freedom of the press clause. What google intends to do is a novell new work and thus should be intitled to protection as free speach.
With a caveat...that author chooses to have his books in digital format to give for free. Again, he *chooses*. Each author/publisher should have the right to choose.
Agreed, as long as you're not using the word "right" in a misleading fashion and confusing a fair and balanced system of copyright with fundamental human rights...
In this case, I don't see where Google has obtained re-publishing rights to match what it is about to do. However, the only "legal right" the authors/publishers etc have (or will have once it happens) is to sue google for infringement. And sue they should, at around $250k per work you'd think the bill would add up rather quickly.
I'm sitting here imagining an army of lawyers slathering at the mere thought of all that well documented infringement by a wealthy public corporation...
having media online for reference does anything but stifle the market. not to mention google only allows you to read a few pages before telling you to go get the hard copy. are these people stupid or just dumb?
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
In the USA, my car insuarance "liability" payment actually exceeds my income since I have very little income and three vehicles, the state requiring a policy for each one. I think your percentages above 100% can be increased in order to more accurately represent how distribution works in the USA. And I have no wrecks - ever. But if someone else hits me or scratchs my door, the scratch rusts and is not covered by "my" insurance.
Mercy on Academic Publishers?
(belly grows wide)
HO HO HO Ho ! Whaaaa ha ha ha ha.
Maybe "their turn has come."
And students can use the HP printer for Hamlet instead of paying $12. for a used paperback with the cover torn off of it from the "University" bookstore.
It just wouldn't be College if you weren't required to *pay* for books written by the professor -- at about a buck fifty a page...
Reminds me of Gutenberg
Go Away! Not for Sale
yes, those are all legitimate reasons. I was saying that you were wrong about what sorts of things would be cutting into what costs. Printing costs, no; staff costs, yes.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Has Google's web search been accused of copyright infringement? How is it fundamentally different from news or book searches?
I suspect that web search engines don't typically get sued for copyright infringement only because they've been around for as long as the Web has been popular. But whether Google indexes a web site or a book, it doesn't (okay, if you overlook the web cache) deliver the content; it only references it and makes it more accessible.
If Google made it as easy to find information in books as it has done for the Web, publishers should be PAYING Google to index their works, not fretting and threatening to sue over it. Think about it. What better way to tell people about books they might be interested in buying? Traditional advertising and shelf-browsing are hit-and-miss at best. Content searches over books would be a phenomenal way to attract customers (IMHO etc).
I don't stock many technical books, but I can tell you that the classics (not covered by copyright) do still sell very well. Of course it does help that we have classics for $4.95 AU and leather bound classics for $9.95 AU (Stephan King's latest pulp is $65 AU).
Well... here's a distinct problem. Take a look at this...
Google Catalog (Beta)
http://catalog.google.com/
Now... type in, oh, for instance... "atlas shrugged". You get this: http://catalog.google.com/catalogs?q=atlas+shrugge d&btnG=Search+Catalogs
Notice how you are now seeing PICTURES of scanned pages from catalogs, with sections highlighted. Click on the selection, and you can literally flip through the pages of each catalog as needed.
While Google Books may well ONLY display the type of thing Amazon.com does... like, when you type in "atlas shrugged" in amazon's book search... then, roll-over it. They will allow you to search INSIDE the book, and return short excerts from all the matches for the word you're looking for (including the page number, etc. The top of the page then offers more options like: "table of contents", "short excerpt", "copyright" and "front and back cover".
I think Amazon's approach fits nicely in "fair use". If Google's approach to books is anything like its "mail-order catalog" approach... I could see the cause for concern (and conversely why Google might think it "ok"). On the one hand... I'd much rather BUY a book, than attempt to print it from a webpage, clicking, and turning through each page. It'd be pretty useless. --However, for research, it'd be a timesaver, and cut the library OUT of many a need... especially if you just need a diagram or a short bibliographical quote. It would begin rendering many institutions infinitely less needed.
But... the amazing thing would be that such a thing would create an unprecedented opportunity. Imagine not just search on web pages for a specific phrase, but searching every book that's ever seen print. The more you add to that scenario... well, Lexis Nexis, eat your heart out.
A: Nobody!
I believe what they intend to do is:
Google does show the actual page content of books, though you cannot see every page.
Even if Google does not give away the whole book, a resourceful person can get quite educated by looking at what Google has scanned. Then again, such a resourceful person can go to the library and get the whole book.
People who live in remote places without the benefits of a well stocked library will benefit.
I support the idea of a search engine presenting the source of information.
When it comes to the touchy subject of providing copyrighted information on the Internet, here is a solution. Let the major Internet players such as the search engines, the ISPs, major software companies, etc. become publishers. Google ought to bear expenses of publishing, including the compensation of authors regardless of whether anyone buys. Furthermore, Google should make the entire contents of books, that it publishes, available for free.
What Google is doing should be economically helpful for us all. Some mechanism is required to return funds to Google and to authors. The whole idea is supposed to be win-win. It's just too sensible.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I'd expect dissemination of information to be the goal behind the non-profit university presses. A goal which the Google's index should help.
Of course the goal of the non-profits may not be the same as the goals of the people employed by the non-profits...
Anyway, making Google searches refer to the books should increase sales quite a lot.
That was a horrible example, in the case of the jewlery store, they simply become an online presence, secure the crap outta their warehouse location, and problem solved... more convinient for the customer as they can shop from home, less risk for the store, since it doesn't have to treat every potential customer as a possible physical security threat.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Then take your internet library book and feed it through a text-to-speech program. You could get an audiobook copy of "A Brief History of Time" as read by the author... for free.