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Book Publishers Agree to Online Browsing
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."
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
Baen has been doing this for years: http://www.baen.com/library/
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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
... 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
Why didn't they go through a single company/entity that has a track record of reliable search? Each to their own isn't really going to help. Unlike music, books can be considered physical things, and many people, myself included do _not_ like reading books online. If I like a book for a partiuclar topic, I will buy it.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Some of us "get it" - but we have been here for a number of years and don't have vast amounts of money tied up in copyright and intellectual property rights. The first and most important thing is to *own your property* My deal with Carlton gives me absolute freedom with the text I wrote - it only stamps on publishers who might pirate the book - hence the fact that the entire HTML-ised version of "Complete Hackers Handbook" is available for free. I own it - I can do what I want with it - lets keep it that way ....
Creative Copyright is a great tool also - but if you get signed to a publisher - make sure you own what you created ...
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).
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.
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.
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.