Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.