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Tim O'Reilly on the Google Library Project
dkleinsc writes "The New York Times is running an op-ed piece(free registration required) by Tim O'Reilly arguing that the Google Library Project is a good thing for authors in general, and suggests a lawsuit by the Author's Guild against Google is acting against authors' best interest."
The access to literature this will bring is double edged; searchability will make the entire published works of man into some kind of uber cliffs notes. In the end there will still be those that understand what Melville was writing and those that read a book about fighting a whale.
Obviously there is much to be lost by publishers who, like the RIAA, act as gatekeepers on published works. If the Author's Guild really likes the current system, then why do so few works circulate more than 5,000 copies? Wouldn't their members be better served with wider distribution?
Depends on who their members are, especially the more influential ones. If they are mostly authors whose books get published at 50,000 copies, then they have every reason to prefer the current system with gate keepers. It prevents competition.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I'm still waiting for Mr O'Reilly to make all his books available for free.
You obviously do not understand what the true intention of the Google Library Project is. That's ok, though, as a lot of people don't. It is not an attempt to put the full test of every book on line so that you can access the full text for free. It is an attempt to make a fully searchable database of every book. It's main beneficiary will not be cheap bastards who think everything should be free, but rather scholars doing research: they'll have, ostensibly, only one database that they will have to search. The people who actually have the most to lose from this are companies that currently provide database services of this sort (like ABI/Inform) to university libraries.
As such, O'Reilly is not in any way being a hypocritic if he supports Google's efforts in this particular enterprise.
my pet machine
but they are not stupid. When considering this plan, I'm sure they anticipated the objection & litigation, but after consulting with their attorneys, they must have reached the conclusion that their position is defensible, and therefore winnable. It will be an interesting court case, that's for sure.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
You've got it backwards. They're not trying to protect their rights. The guild wants to limit citizens' rights. They don't like fair use rights. They can only lobby against fair use so strongly today because their money easily influences our politicians. I agree they should be concerned about Google completely indexing books. But they should work with Google to ensure nothing beyond fair use is allowed. Instead they're trying to stop Google completely.
This isn't about the rights of the members of the guild. It's about their money.
Developers: We can use your help.
To be honest, I doubt that the real issue is what the Author's Guild is really saying it is. Anyone with basic reading ability and knowledge of copyright law knows this is a doomed suit to begin with.
But consider what winning would mean... If they won, you could not index books without the copyright holder's consent. Which I'm sure they would be happy to give for a modest, recurring, license fee.
Lets be honest here, if most of the people in the Guild circulate fewer than 5,000 copies of their works, they aren't going to be that confident that Goggle is going to suddenly burst open the gates of buyers ready to purchase their book. The easy money is in royalties from licensing their books to the index.
1: Google digitizes a significant percentage of the books in print and actually makes them searchable. This is a significant undertaking that very few other companies can even consider doing, although Microsoft will certainly try in order to keep up with Google.
2: People actually use this index, finding out about books in their areas of interest they never knew existed before. (And that was always the true magic of P2P music sharing. Finding performances of your favorite song by artists you never knew recorded it, or songs by your favorite artist you never knew existed in the first place. There was no way to ever find stuff like this before.)
3: Google becomes even more popular than before. PROFIT from AdWords and other synergies.
4: Google acquires Project Gutenberg and expands on their free, public domain, efforts. PROFIT - at least if you're associated with PG.
5: Public Domain is strengthened for all of us because works in PD are now more accessable to everyone. PROFIT - more traffic to Google to get these works, and society overall is richer!
6: For books still under copyright and in print, Google becomes the biggest referrer to purchasers to Amazon and Barnes & Nobel, which are now only one click away. PROFIT!
7: With everything already digitized, the moment the Author's Guild gets away from giving themselves a self-induced colonoscopy, Google starts selling full e-books of everything they already have digitized. PROFIT to Google, AND THE AUTHORS!
Yup, pull in that truck and load up my stock!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But, yet, you cannot post the O'Reilly Bookshelf to your website...
Click here or here.
Not only that, but O'Reilly already has a service that allows his books to be searched just like Google wants to do.
So not only is he not a hypocrit, but he beat google to it.
The cake is a pie
I just sent them the following e-mail:
l king.htm
To: staff@authorsguild.org
Subject: Google Lawsuit
http://www.authorsguild.org/news/charity_handy_ta
Let me imagine a moment that I'm a publisher, or Writer's Guild.
Let me further imagine that a corporation wants to offer a free search engine, to make it easier for potential customers to search for and find the works written by the writers I represent.
I'll continue this pleasant little thought experiment by assuming they don't want to charge me or my writers any money. We don't even have to sign up.
It's not unlike what Amazon.com does for the books it sells, except this corporation wants to not only make the entire book searchable, while only making small segments available to readers, but offer a selection of purchase options, so potential readers will be even MORE likely to purchase the books.
What do I do?
Do I thank them for offering this free service that will only pour more money into the pockets of the writers I represent?
Do I start making arrangements to get them electronic copies of the books, so the writers I represent can get into the index that much sooner?
Oh, I know, I'll sue. I'll ignore all the long term benefits, and try to kill the project by blackmailing the corporation with a lawsuit and demands that THEY pay ME for providing a service to MY writers!
Brilliant.
I selecting the last option, I've guaranteed that the up and coming writers will never look twice at me or the organization I represent, assuming it's nothing but a club for Luddites, afraid of technology and more interested in scraping up a few pennies here and there than in actually turning a profit.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Ok... I just need to jump in here. Safari != O'Reilly Safari is a joint venture by Pearson Education (AW, PTR, Sams...) and O'Reilly (with Microsoft Press and others publishers adding their content to the mix later).
Also, Tim (and many other publishers) realize that the Google thing will do is help sales of books. Some of the best selling books are available for free online. People on a whole love real books... dead trees and all... after staring at a computer screen for a few hours reading, many people, once they've decided that the content will satisfy their needs/desires will fork over the money for hard copy of the book.
In fact... the only thing such a service does is weed out the worst material (after all if you read a couple of pages of crap you aren't going to buy that book are you?).
A final note... publishers really aren't afraid of competition from self publishing/small publishing (whatever). probably 90% of all self/small published books are published that way because a big publisher turned the book/author away to begin with. This isn't to say that everything published by big publishers is golden (it isn't... by a long shot), but in general I'd say ~ 80% of what you get from big publishing companies is actually quite good, while ~80% of everything else out there sucks.
--- Nothing To See Here ---
Doesn't matter for this suit. That they are not disclosing the full content of what they have scanned is of no importance. What is important is that Google itself has scanned the books without permission, and still has the data.
The Google defense ("but we are not showing the whole books!") doesn't cut much mustard. It is as if *you* scanned a whole lot of books at the library and thought you could get away scott free because you don't plan to share what you've scanned with anybody.