Slashdot Mirror
Second Google Suit Over Print Library Project
linumax writes "The Association of American Publishers, an organization of book publishers including Pearson Plc's Penguin unit and McGraw-Hill sued Google over its plan to create a digital Web library of printed books. The Association of American Publishers sued Wednesday after talks broke down with Google over copyright issues raised by the Google Print Library Project. Publishers say Google will infringe copyrights unless it gets advance permission for the scanning. The suit is the second by the publishing industry against Google's library plans and underscores the worries sparked by Google's expansion beyond Web search." From the article: "Google, which is working with five of the world's great libraries (Stanford, Harvard and Michigan university libraries, the New York Public Library and the Bodleian library in Oxford) to digitise their collections, stopped scanning copyrighted books in August after protests from publishers. However, it intends to resume its work next month."
I once almost collided with Pat Schroeder crossing the street in downtown Denver. Maybe I should have (we were both on foot, btw).
I'm surprised Pat Schroeder is involved with or leading the charge in attempts to throttle Google. She offers tepid reasoning (probably not enough prep time spent with handlers) (from the article) :
She's right! This does go far beyond creating a digital version of a card catalog! Google's super-sized revved up digital card catalog qualifies as a godsend to the publishing industry.
The ability to do Google indexed book searches will spur reading, and sales, not muffle it. How many slashdot readers have been thankful for the Amazon.com feature of letting you peek inside their books? Many times this has been the feature giving me the final nudge to buy (though there also have been times where that nudged me the other direction).
When people start "discovering" books with Google's book searches, the very worst thing that would happen would be that people would be briefly exposed to books they otherwise might not have. But for "searchers" who find an interesting book, they won't be ripping the publishers off by printing (stealing) or downloading (stealing) these books, since Google isn't offering that as an option.
And assuming for the moment some figure out how to download a copy, they're left with a book on their computer... not convenient to read (e-books, still on respirator), and way too expensive to print (and aesthetically "not a book").
So, the most likely result would be a library visit, or purchase.
Come on Pat!, think again.
I guess we'll all have to memorize our favorite book.
Books are a bit like software, and the try before you buy model works well. I have a hard time imagining most people deciding to read the entirety of a long book on their computer, even if it's available for free. I can imagine quite a few people looking at a new book online and using that as the basis for choosing to buy the book if they're going to read it though.
Fortunately, at least a few companies display a bit of understanding. The people initiating these lawsuits should read the introduction Here, and then check Baen's profits, and note that they're still in business and doing reasonably well, thank you very much.
Of course, everybody else should go there simply to check out some books for free, and (perhaps) to support Baen Books for being decent people and doing good things.
--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
These associations of book publishers should be careful with what they do, or they could quickly find themselves in the position of the RIAA and MPAA amongst far more people than just geeks. I'd wager every single person I know has been to our city's library system at least once in their lifetime. (Columbus, OH) And I'd also be willing to bet that should the courts be stupid enough to allow this to spill over eventually to the library's that there would be a lot of people pissed that they might cripple our city's library system which happens to be the best one in the nation because there are about 30+ library's "linked together" across the city. In other words, I can go to my local library building (or even online: http://www.cml.lib.oh.us/) and reserve just about any DVD, CD, book, or magazine that I could ever want. It's like a physical version of Kazaa, eDonkey, or any other P2P system, except all the content IS stored on the central "server". (The library drives trucks of books around all over the city, transporting them from one location to another based on patron requests)
So, how is Google any different, except that it's potentially more massive, EVEN faster than the library system I'm used to, and available to even more people?? It's just an extension of the concept that's been around in my city in "snail-mail" form for quite a while now. Keep it up and they're liable to piss off a vast majority of the population of the US if the laws about copyrights keep getting extended further and further away from the original intent of copyright law.
No, this isn't my most well-though-out post ever, but I wanted to highlight this facet of the debate over Google's LIbrary Project.
I work with one of those academic library institutions.
This is more like an effort by the libraries, and Google is basically under contract to do the heavy lifting of scanning and technology, because they're good at such grand data projects. Traditional libraries simply aren't scaled and don't have the budgets to do it all by themselves. There's major cost savings in consolidation and expense-sharing. Why scan 7 times when you can scan once?
It seems like the publishers are really aiming for a for-fee privatized electronic library system, cutting out traditional non-profit libraries.
We are mere months (maybe a year) away from the ability to completely scan any book and convert it accurately to text based PDF in under an hour. It will likely be F/OSS software that does it, released ostensibly to save old books in the public domain.
When this happens, books will end up on P2P just like movies, music, porn, and images. Just as P2P helps people find interesting musicians and performers, it will help people find interesting writers and authors.
As an author, I couldn't agree more.
Most people want to curl up with a good book and read in comfort, lying in bed, on their couch, in their recliner (cracking fire and comfortable cup of tea/coffee/hot chocolate optional). A few folks don't mind sitting in front of a computer to read, but the rest of us like good old fashioned, physical books in our hands, and what Google is doing is not only NOT a threat to the sale of traditional bound books, it is a boon.
What it isn't a boon for is old guard publishers having a stranglehold on exposure anymore, meaning that self-published, POD, and other less traditional forms of publishing gain more leverage in attracting interested eyes, without having to somehow get ahold of that coveted shelf space in a brick-and-mortor store.
Not that I don't covet that for my novel (I do), but the more accessible the information is to those looking for it, the more people will buy the physical version of the book.
The AAR has its head up its ass, and win-or-lose on this particular lawsuit, they and their constituents are going to lose bigtime if they don't update their mentality to fit with the technological reality of today, and begin exploiting the opportunities it offers.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The substance of what you said has an implied presumption that when something is coppied, distributed, or even sold without the creators permission, then the creator/publishor is in some way violated. While I understand that's the theory, and we have all been spoonfeed that that is an "intellectual property" right, the reality is quite different.
While protected rights, naturally lead to incentives - protected incentives do not naturally lead to rights. Perhaps somebody feels violated when you freely copy, then again perhaps plantation masters feel violated if you steal, oops I mean free, slaves from the plantation. That is what I mean. Property and incentive are not an ends in themselves, to be just they need to derive from the real world - like the fact that not everybody can use the same resources at the same time, but with information they can!
Copyrights are particualrly evil because they have the effect of stealing away our culture and giving it to hollywood. They also have an effect, that to secure them, you need to microregulate the internet and everybody that uses it. They have an effect that leads to anti-trust behavior in large software companies, and tend to make the information itself more valuable then the people who provide the services. The cost of having them in the information age is simply too high and they can not survive the information age any more than micro-controll of the labor market (slavery) could survive the industrial revolution.
Free scan, free search, free marketing. Of course the book publishers would be against it. It might mess up their carefully constructed marketing plans by creating a demand they were previously unaware of
Inventors get seventeen years (actually it varies) of protection. Is there a reason that authors need "lifetime plus 75 years"? I have only the greatest respect for authors (with some exceptions...) but I think the transistor, antibiotics, and the airplane have more of an impact on my life than Gore Vidal and Dave Barry.
Many of the works that are currently on the shelves will NEVER go into the public domain. And there is one thing authors need more than anything else--people that love reading. A large free corpus is a good way to build that.