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Publishers Thank Google for Book Sales
eldavojohn writes "A few book publishers are actually thanking Google for an apparent rise in sales due to Google's scan plan. Google is busy defending itself against authors and publishers that have brought lawsuits for ignoring copyrights. The director of the Oxford University Press said, 'Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers.' It seems to work in favor of the smaller publishers: 'Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the 'buy this book' Google link.' Do you think that Google's 'sneak peak' search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?"
Bah. Read this comment from the last Google Book Search Slashdot discussion. It boils down to the fact that not all copying is infringement. "For example, the courts have ruled that it is perfectly legal to copy every image you can find on the internet, and store those images, for the purpose of providing a thumbnail image of those images for profit. That is because what is being sold is meta-data about where you can find an image, not the images themselves. The courts have also ruled that making low quality copies of porn images and making them available is illegal, because the intent was for people to just look at the images and the effect upon the market was to deprive the copyright holders of business."
At least some publishers believe it increases sales, and it's certainly not a clear cut case of copyright infringement.
They should announce that for one month, publishers can choose to give google permission to index their books.
At the end of the month, every publisher that didn't gets dropepd from the index. If they want back in (because, for example, they discover their competition is getting hundreds of click-throughs with 40% or more sales) they have to pay Google either a BIG up-front payment or a percentage of all future sales.
It's funny, but most places make you pay heaps for advertising. Especially for well-targeted and effective advertising that leads to a high percentage of sales. I never understood why google feels they have to give it away free.
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if you were to go into a bookstore, you could just as easily browse through thousands of books and still have your choice as to wether or not to buy them, so if google is providing an atmosphere where you can not only preview the book, but purchase it as well, then i think they should have every right to do so... so long as they are not publishing the ENTIRE contents of the book online without the consent of the owner, after all, would you buy a book online if you didnt know anything more than what is written on the cover?
Google books will never replace real books for me, but the service is very, very useful.
Case in point: I was writing a research paper this week, and needed to search through a book for a specific name. As this book didn't have an index, I wasn't too enthused about looking through it page-by-page for one bit of information, so I fired up Google books and, bingo - got the name, page number, and some more information as well.
More importantly, however, was a second case. As I was about to turn in the paper, I realized I hadn't completed a reference and needed to find a page number in a book I didn't have with me. I first thought I was screwed, but then fired up Google books and, once again, bingo - I got precisely what I needed even though my book was 25 miles away at the time.
Google adds value to books. I'll still buy just as many books as before - probably more, as now it's easier for me to find books I'm interested in - and makes the books I own much more "user friendly". Great service.
Perfectly informed consumers are a necessary condition of a perfectly competitive market. The large x don't want the current market to become more competitive because that favors small x.
When it comes to pastry theft, I take the cake.
No, the difference is that the bookstore purchased the book for you to peruse (although bookstore purchasing is really weird with their return to publisher policies) and that Google paid no one a cent for their copy. This is more akin to you taking the book from the bookstore, letting someone else peruse it and then taking the money back into the bookstore to pay for what you took.
I think Google will get away with this obvious infringement on copyright for a reason entirely unrelated to issues of ownership or profit. And that is that the government wants it. Specifically, the government wants to be able to quickly datamine works to determine explicitly, and by correlation, what exactly certain people are reading and writing and why.
Google may even get funding from the government to do this, or to give special fulltext database access to investigators.
The Supreme Court will back them up because the use will be declared to be necessary to the needs of law enforcement and national security.
Imagine if a friend asked you to search through a book for him and let him know what you found. Would this also be a violation? Chances are, you'd only quote a paragraph or so back to him - Google quotes even less of the book.
- media dance, and it was really cute, back in the day. But the Piper's arrived, and just in time, too, cuz a whole generation of kids was just starting to believe that "do no evil" thing somehow exempted Google from obeying laws they thought were old-fashioned (i.e., prevented them from making money).
The difference is, your friend does not increase his market share every time he lets someone search through a book. Neither is your friend selling advertising on the walls of the room into which he escorts you to take his book. Nor is he capturing your search request in a database for cross-reference with other search requests from people in your zipcode later on.
Google profits from your search. Your friend allows your search out of charity.
If Google wants to include my copyrighted content as part of their profit-making venture, they can pay me. I'm a poor starving writer (or maybe I'm Stephen King, it doesn't matter), and Google is a super-mega-global-corporation (or maybe their a mom-and-pop store, it doesn't matter), and if they want to use my stuff to make some scratch, I'll take my percentage, thanks very much. If my price is too high, we can negotiate. If it's still too high, we can walk away and talk about doing business another day. That's Business. And Google is in Business.
Google plays up the peace-love-understanding-happy-hippie-new-age-new
And here is the rub.
While google is only displaying excerpts, they are making digital copies of the entire book to drive their searches. And those copies are likely dupicated multiple times within their infrastructure.
If they only took excerpts and made them searchable, then they would likely be well within fair use and the authors and publishers couldn't touch them. But they are doing much more than that.
This is the same legal hole that MP3.com found themselves in several years ago. They were providing streaming music to people who could prove that they already owned the CDs. This way you could listen to your CD collection while at work, etc. (This was pre-iPod). In order to drive this system, however, they made digital copies of tens of thousands of cds. They only made the digital versions available to people who alredy owned the CD, but they were still found to be infringing because they made the copies in their own database in the first place.
Now, if you want my opinion, this is bs, and copyright law and the fair use doctrine needs to be adjusted to allow this kind of use.
It is prudent to remember in the case of bookstores that they buy the copies wholesale from the publisher. At that point they are the bookstore's property to do with as they wish - obviously, most of them choose to let you browse the product.
But the publishers aren't selling them "in stores" a la consignment. They are selling them *to* the stores. They've already made their money, and are no longer part of the equation.
Libraries are a bit trickier, but for the most part they buy their books, too, and so again, what is their complaint? One particular copy can cycle itself through the system as much as possible.
The issue here is that Google has not bought these books, and even if they had, are they allowed to make a digital copy available (such that infinite copies can be made.) The first issue is easy - Google ought to pay these publishers either a licensing fee or some one-time fee to display their product freely. And Google ought to do that as goodwill, because they are essentially acting as a bookstore, but on consignment instead - which is where the legal ambiguity steps in. If Google acted more as your typical brick and mortar bookstore, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
The fact that there are so many slashdotters who seem to have blindly accepted the "if I reproduce anything of the text it is copyright violation" is amazing. If here on Slashdot there are that many people who have accepted the death of fair use rights I worry that effectively we really have already lost them.
There needs to be some copyright protection but it should never interfere with the good of society. Being able to search and access information freely is critical for an educated society and an educated society is critical for an advanced democratic civilization. I think providing free links to purchase copies of the material should be more than enough compensation to producers of science and art - if their work is worth buying then they'll sell more than they otherwise would have.
Opting out should not be an option for copyright holders. They are given fair compensation so the good of society should then come first. Maybe Google could also offer a way for authors to register for additional free ads related to their works. I for one would like to know when they have new books coming out, their web site, etc.
I think it's like the battle against music downloading. I buy far more CDs now than I did before I started downloading MP3s and it's because I'm much more aware of what is out there. I have wider tastes in music now and I know what more artists are called instead of only half knowing their music from the radio. Example given, I bought the new Weird Al CD on release day because I saw the YouTube video of White and Nerdy that was floating around.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Actually, many people have formed these parties. They fail primarily because free-thinking people can't agree on most things.
Unfortunately, even if they could agree on something en masse, free-thinkers are highly outnumbered by sheep who'd rather just get on with their lives, and vote for whoever hasn't pissed them off this year.
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