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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_
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
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
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?
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The digital "copy" offered by Google is certainly not "just as good" as a real copy. It is better in one way and worse in several others. First, it is better because you can find passages by searching. If I type "hemoglobin rupture" I can find a number of specific references. It is worse in that reading on a screen sucks, it hurts your eyes after a time and ties you to a screen and electricity. More importantly, Google is not allowing anyone to read a whole book, only a small passage from the book. In a few very specific cases (like a dictionary, or reference with very short entries) this might be as good, but for the most part it is not. Google has taken great care to limit this and design the service to help you find the name of the book you need, not to let you read it for free.
There are three real reasons scholarly publishers are against this. First dictionaries and references with very short passages are made obsolete (as I mentioned above). Second, many modern scholars do not really want to read a work, merely cite it to back up some point and these people would be better served by just using Google's service. Finally, it allows a researcher to read a short, relevant passage from a book which is often enough to know that a book is useless and prevent someone from buying a work that sounds useful, but is not.
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.
You seem to be under the impression that Google is just offering up books for free in digital format. That is not my understanding of the service at all.
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.
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
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!).
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.
"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)
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).
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.