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Book Publishers Agree to Online Browsing

Posted by Zonk on from the online-is-the-best-line dept.

eldavojohn writes "Random House & HarperCollins have agreed to allow book browsing and searching on all their books. According to the article, 'Book publishers are to trying to update their businesses as more young readers consume media via the Web, a trend that already has affected the music, movie and newspaper industries.' I am definitely looking forward to more publishers following suit. It's not that far of a stretch to imagine a person searching for a book, finding something else and then buying both books."

11 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. About time... by crazyjeremy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's about time! Now I hope they make it simple to use and search (Amazon's is clunky, only shows a couple pages and incompatible with many browsers.) When I'm purchasing online, I will ONLY buy books that I am familiar with especially when it's a technical book. It's silly to spend cash on a book if you're not certain it's the right one...

    --
    Funnypics
    1. Re:About time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I second that, I end up downloading homemade bootlegs of technical books when deciding which one I am going to purchase. I still end up going and paying full price in the bookstore, but I dont have to feel like I'm in the way as I stand in the aisle at B&N reading a chapter of each book on a subject trying to figure out which author is best for me.

  2. Aggregate! by gbulmash · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Great, so they'll let you search their books... through their interface on their site. So if I wanted to search through multiple publishers, if they all follow this example, I'll have to go search each publisher separately. Pardon me if I'm not doing cartwheels.

    I'd say that eventually someone will engineer a metasearch that hits each publisher's search engine with queries and then either screenscrapes or does some other jujumagumbo to try to extract pertinent info from each set and create some semblance of organization, but I'll bet you that the Terms and Conditions on each publisher's site prohibit this and IF someone creates such a beast, they'll be seeing the C&D's come flying in.

    When all is said and done, searching one publisher's catalog at a time is of limited usefulness. And while this may represent a step in the right direction, it also shows that the avatar of most major IP owners is still a kid in the midst of its terrible twos, shouting "MINE!"

    - Greg

    --
    Start a happiness pandemic
    1. Re:Aggregate! by Oligonicella · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And the avatar of the "I want it free" crowd is another terrible twos kid shouting "GIMME!" Your point?

      The only difference I can see is the first kid actually has the right to claim ownership and the second just wants it given to them.

    2. Re:Aggregate! by gbulmash · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And the avatar of the "I want it free" crowd is another terrible twos kid shouting "GIMME!" Your point?

      Actually, they don't shout "gimme" (at least my terrible twoster doesn't). They just grab what they want and declare it theirs, or point at what they want and grunt.

      But my point is that as we mature, we learn the benefits of cooperation and sharing, we can see the bigger picture and know when giving up some control will be to our benefit.

      They're not offering the book search out of the goodness of their hearts. They're offering it because they believe it will drive revenues. But, because they're afraid of losing control, they try to keep that search within their own little fiefdom where they can keep an eye on it. But by keeping it exclusive of other searches, they limit its usefulness. And by doing that, they diminish the potential benefit to themselves, because fewer people will use it.

      - Greg

      --
      Start a happiness pandemic
  3. I'd be more impressed... by Grendel+Drago · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... if they released their content to Google Book Search. It's not really that useful for me if it's not integrated with a larger search engine--and I'll wager their interface ends up being not nearly as clean or useful as Google's. It might, but it's not likely.

    --
    Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
  4. doze only plugin? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I can't wait to see what kind of windows only browser plugin they come up with to do this...

    (Hey, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I doubt it).

  5. Too little, too late by Randseed · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Unfortunately, this is far too little, too late. What has been happening in the scientific community for literally years now is that the individuals who are performing research and are not financially strapped to some journal are getting their research peer-reviewed themselves, then publishing it. In reality, what this means is that they publish their research along two paths: one, to satisfy some journal, and two, to get reviewed by other means. If you sit around and do a Medline search on it, you'll get the former. But if you really try, you'll get the latter.

    So what's the difference, you ask? People who are involved in rather esoteric research areas, which includes things like stem cell research for example, release this stuff among themselves. Peer review is all well and good, but this material is released far before it achieves journal publication. This is both good and bad. It's good because it gets distributed. It's bad because the peer-review simply isn't there _except_ for the investigator's colleagues critisizing it.

    In other words, the research community has become somewhat self-contained itself. We're all too aware of the ridiculous biases that exist in the "public" sector (in other words, those people who tow some party line because it gets them more funding).

  6. Re:If all books were accessible through Google Sea by sirambrose · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't understand what you're talking about. Google Books offers a full text book search that lets you see context without reading the entire book. It works just like the service discussed in the article, except it has books from multiple publishers.

  7. Linking to books to increase sales by frisket · · Score: 3, Insightful
    It's not that far of a stretch to imagine a person searching for a book, finding something else and then buying both books."

    That's not the only business model, either. If the text is accessible online, then publishers could allow deep linking into a book. That way you could point someone at a quote, or a section, or a page, even just a phrase, without the need for them to download the entire thing. Exposing someone to a book this way is an excellent opportunity to sell it to them. Assuming the books are in SGML or XML, implementing this method is almost trivial.

  8. So they have e-pub rights for all of their books? by julesh · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm not entirely sure how they expect to be able to legally do this. I mean, this was one of the things that got Google into trouble with their book search service: they accepted publishers' words that they had the legal right to grant permission for this, when in many (if not most) cases, only the authors of the books have the necessary legal rights to put copies of them online. Most publishing contracts, even now, do not grant the publisher permission to do this. Copyright remains with the authors in most cases.