Google Print solution in hand - support COCOA
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 1
The good news is... we have the solution in hand.
We've been working on this problem since Amazon released Search Inside the Book; we brought together experts from both ends of the copyright spectrum, and have developed a solution, called the COCOA (Copyright Owners' Control of Access) standard.
Some notes-- COCOA does not inhibit indexing, searching, or displaying text snippet search results.
On the contrary, COCOA will result in far more books and more pages being available, legally.
Please read how COCOA works at the site, read the FAQ, and by all means ask via the comment form on the site if you have questions. There have unfortunately been a number of misconceptions of what COCOA is or how it works. So, if COCOA somehow doesn't look good to you, please ask for clarification since COCOA was specifically designed to satisfy just about everyone regardless where they stand on copyright matters.
Thanks for having a look (and signing the petition and spreading the word, if you're so inclined),
Borrowing from a library or reading in a bookstore are hugely different, for these reasons:
(1) The library paid for the copy you're borrowing. (Or somebody
paid for it, in case the book was donated to the library.) Thus the author
was paid for that copy. If you read a whole copyrighted book via a Content Display Site (CDS - Google Print, Amazon Search Inside, etc.) and never buy the book,
the author wasn't paid. Copyright law is about creating new copies;
you're not creating a new copy when you read in a store or from
a library.
(2) Browsing in a bookstore is pretty inconvenient. You can't take the copy
with you to look at any time you want. (Unless you buy it! That's sort of
the point.) Bookstores know that few people really read entire books
in the store -- else they'd go out of business. However, reading a
book from a CDS doesn't have that limitation: You can take it
with you, on your laptop, etc. This is particularly critical in light
of digital paper, when the digital copy is the paper copy.
(3) Libraries and bookstore reading isn't anywhere near free: You have to
move your physical body to the bookstore to read. For one thing, you can't
likely do that at 3am. (And certainly not in your pajamas.) You can't
do it from your bed, couch, or desk, without getting up. You have
to spend time to move your body down there, which might be
10min-30min each way; 20-60min round trip, plus say 10min to find the
book, a place to sit, etc; call it 30-70min. If you value your time
at say, $10/hr, that's $5-12. Then there's the cost of transportation.
If the library/bookstore is three miles away, 6mi. round trip, and gas
costs $2.50/gal., and you get 20mi/gal., that's another $.75. The IRS
figures driving a car costs $.405/mile in repairs, wearing it out, etc.,
so that's another $2.40. So you're at something like $8-15 to go read a
"free" book.
Really -- if it were that free, people would do a lot more of it.
Yet reading a free copy from a CDS doesn't have those limitations. It is
much closer to $0, actually and truly free. THAT's the problem.
(4) You can't pass on a "free" copy you read in the store or from the library.
You have to leave the book at the bookstore (or buy it); you have to return
the book to the library. Reading a book in digital form that was stolen
from a CDS, you could pass that copy on to others by email, via a web
page, P2P software, etc.
So, bottom line, bookstore/library reading isn't really free. CDS copies are essentially free, and that's
the problem. They're too convenient to read free.
This is one of the reasons we formed the COCOA Association
( http://www.copyrightaccess.com/ ), to make more copyrighted work available. (Note, COCOA does not inhibit indexing and searching and returning text snippet search results -- just what page images can be displayed.) If you support this, please sign our petition at
http://www.petitiononline.com/cocoa/petition.html -- thanks!
In the old days they were the only ones who could cost effectively print and distribute books. That is not the case anymore.
Respectfully disagree, for the typical case. If you have access to a tightly targeted market, sure, you can do it yourself. But for your average fiction book or garden variety non-fiction where the author isn't tied into the readership, and the author's expectation is that it will be on bookshelves across America, it is emphatically not true that one can compete with the major publishers in cost effectively printing and distributing books:
If you want to get your book on the shelves of every real bookstore in the country, you're looking at printing and shipping (and taking back, with return shipping on your nickel) say 10-20,000 copies. Let's go with 10,000 for example. Let's say you go with a trade paper edition from some reasonable POD outfit like LuLu (who probably ties into Lightning like I'd guess PA does too). Setup at LuLu is free -- you plop over your text. (Now, you ought to have paid for real copyediting, and formatting it right for print will take time or you can pay someone, and there's decent cover art, so let's say you put a piddly $1,000 into that. Your cost as author to purchase copies is, say, $8, and you want them in 10,000 stores, so you've got shipping to each store (media rate is $1.42 for a pound or under), plus the shipping envelopes at say $25c in bulk, so let's say $2 each to ship, plus you'll probably get half of them returned (50% returns meaning you've done well!), at another $2 shipping to you, so that's another $1 a copy average to factor in -- so $8+2+1=$11/copy in costs. So, you've printed and shipped 10,000 copies at $11, costing you $110,000 up front before you can see a dime ($111k with your other costs). (That's not counting your *time* in shipping these out -- at 5min a package including time at the post office, that's 100 8-hour days!) Now, the bookstore (or a distributor like Ingram) wants aroundabout a 50% discount off cover price, so if you want to get back that $11 with say $1 profit, you'll have to put the list price at around $24. If you're lucky and sell half of them, you get back, many months later, half your books that didn't sell (5,000 copies) plus payment for those that sold of 5,000 x $12 = $60,000.
Oops, you just lost $50,000.
POD, like PublishAmerica, is only economically feasible if you don't have the copies on bookstore shelves. But if you don't have the copies on store shelves, you have an incredibly hard time selling your book. (In -most- cases; exceptions are as you say.)
How does a real publisher make money at this? Volume discounts: They don't have to pay the high costs per copy for the printing, and for the shipping they lump copies of different titles together. They subsidize losses from titles that don't break even by having bestsellers that sell tons of copies (thus effectively near-zero returns). Yes, publishers often lose money on titles, especially titles from new authors. (Whom they hope will get a following and sell better in the future.)
Sad to say, but as a one-title self-publisher, it's extraordinarily difficult to make a profit. You might make a hundred bucks, but to really sell to the mass public you risk tens of thousands of dollars. Real publishers do this for you, because they believe in the book (that it'll make them and you both money). PublishAmerica is most definitely not a "traditional" publisher. Go see how many of their titles you can find in your local Barnes & Noble, compared to Random House, Tor, etc. (Lucky if you can fine one title, and if you do, chances are it's a local author and only carried in that one store.)
This isn't changing until we have *real* e-books (i.e. outselling paper books), and even then, you'll have to get Eyeballs on Product or you won't sell.
Alas. But it's PA's claims that they are "traditional" -- and the false hopes they create therefrom -- that get people's bile up.
Which is a "word of caution" about what? That any SF writer who complains about PublishAmerica is a literary parasite and plagiarist?
I see no connection between the quality of the writing of the folks who run http://www.writerbeware.org/ and their low opinions of PublishAmerica.
This began, years back, with some well-respected SF authors chiding PublishAmerica for misleading statements (which Atlanta Nights proves:-), and PublishAmerica wanting to call them names.
When you parse out the (il)logic of that quote from PublishAmerica, they're saying anyone who picks on them is a bad writer and disreputable scum.:-)
In actuality, the ones pointing out the PublishAmerica isn't what they claim are folks who do an enormous amount of work to help aspiring writers get published, educate them about how publishing works, and what to avoid. They've put scammers behind bars, and deserve a lot of credit for "paying forward" (helping the next generation succeed). Check out http://www.writerbeware.org/, compare to the hype at http://www.publishamerica.com/, and make up your own mind.
--Andrew Burt
(VP of SFWA, for which WriterBeware is SFWA's Committee on Writing Scams)
I agree with a lot of what Opencad says -- but the devil is in the details. "...start telling people about it" is where it falls down: Most authors lack the ability and resources to publicize a book beyond a small circle of family and friends. The average number of copies of self-published books on Xlibris, for example, comes out around 100 copies sold per title, based on data in a 4/26/04 Wall St. Journal article. Correct, for "high-value content of use to tightly targeted markets" one can more easily expand the market, but this isn't what most books are that people (want to) self-publish. Your average book that a major publisher won't touch is generally not better than what's already out there, and typically not as good. Self-published titles generally aren't stocked on the thousands of bookstore shelves around the country -- and that is, like it or not, about the only way to get mass quantities of copies sold.
What separates the real publishers from the rest are that they put their neck out for the author financially. They get thousands of copies printed, not knowing if they'll sell, and they pay the shipping to the stores, and are willing to take the copies back if they don't sell (called "returns") for free, even paying the shipping back. Self-published books don't have the margin in them to allow for that. By the time you factor in a little money for the author, the printing costs, shipping, etc. for a returnable book, the cost has risen higher than readers usually will pay. So if you have a market you can tap, terrific, go for it, self-publishing can be your friend. If you haven't the ability to tap a large enough market, then self-publishing won't make you any serious money.
I think this will substantially change for the better with the advent of inexpensive "digital paper" products, i.e. that act like a book in the ways mass consumers want [which ebooks demonstrably don't today -- or they'd sell like paper books]. At the point where you have a "real book" with rifflable pages but digital ink, cheap enough for most folks to afford -- let's say 10-20 years from now -- then this whole picture will change in dramatic ways. But we're not there yet.
And even then: what will remain a constant is the need to get Eyeballs on Product. Marketing and advertising will always be expensive so long as the "human input bandwidth" is limited like it is.
Bottom line, though -- what this sting was about: PublishAmerica makes it seem like all an author needs to do to make a living from writing is get their words into print. The reality is that a real publisher invests a lot of money into getting Eyeballs on Product, and that's the only way most books make any significant money. If PublishAmerica just made it clear how unlikely it was to make money from self-publishing, unless you have the ability to tap into a large market (which very few authors do), I doubt WriterBeware and those of us who are "Travis Tea" would have done this. SFWA and WriterBeware have a long history of helping and educating aspiring authors. Self-publishing/POD is a tool that only works well in the right (and rather limited) circumstances -- but PublishAmerica misleads authors about that, and that's what makes us mad. (If PublishAmerica has 223 new titles each month [78 new authors/mo + 145 second books/mo, from their page at http://www.publishamerica.com/facts/index.htm], each selling an average of say 100 copies over its entire lifetime, selling for say $15 each, PublishAmerica has revenues of 223*100*15 ~ $330,000/mo or $4M/year. Each author, on the other hand, gets an 8% royalty [per PA's contract] from that $15, or $1.20, for $120 total income from their book. Draw your own conclusions.)
If PA quit calling themselves a "traditional" publisher -- or acted like one, vetting work for salability because their neck is on the line and paying out advances of thousa
I moved it to http://www.sfwa.org/members/aburt since the other box began slogging... but yes, the PDF of the whole thing is free. You can buy the print copy off lulu.com if you want the official doorstop memento. As my wife said, "From a distance, it looks like a normal book.":-)
--Andrew Burt
(TravisTea.11 and sort of.34 [I wrote the software used to generate the gibberish in chapter 34])
Slashdot Mirror
We've been working on this problem since Amazon released Search Inside the Book; we brought together experts from both ends of the copyright spectrum, and have developed a solution, called the COCOA (Copyright Owners' Control of Access) standard.
See http://www.copyrightaccess.com/ for details (and if you support it, please sign our petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/cocoa/petition.html) .
Some notes-- COCOA does not inhibit indexing, searching, or displaying text snippet search results.
On the contrary, COCOA will result in far more books and more pages being available, legally.
Please read how COCOA works at the site, read the FAQ, and by all means ask via the comment form on the site if you have questions. There have unfortunately been a number of misconceptions of what COCOA is or how it works. So, if COCOA somehow doesn't look good to you, please ask for clarification since COCOA was specifically designed to satisfy just about everyone regardless where they stand on copyright matters.
Thanks for having a look (and signing the petition and spreading the word, if you're so inclined),
--Dr. Andrew Burt,
Chair, The COCOA Association
(1) The library paid for the copy you're borrowing. (Or somebody paid for it, in case the book was donated to the library.) Thus the author was paid for that copy. If you read a whole copyrighted book via a Content Display Site (CDS - Google Print, Amazon Search Inside, etc.) and never buy the book, the author wasn't paid. Copyright law is about creating new copies; you're not creating a new copy when you read in a store or from a library.
(2) Browsing in a bookstore is pretty inconvenient. You can't take the copy with you to look at any time you want. (Unless you buy it! That's sort of the point.) Bookstores know that few people really read entire books in the store -- else they'd go out of business. However, reading a book from a CDS doesn't have that limitation: You can take it with you, on your laptop, etc. This is particularly critical in light of digital paper, when the digital copy is the paper copy.
(3) Libraries and bookstore reading isn't anywhere near free: You have to move your physical body to the bookstore to read. For one thing, you can't likely do that at 3am. (And certainly not in your pajamas.) You can't do it from your bed, couch, or desk, without getting up. You have to spend time to move your body down there, which might be 10min-30min each way; 20-60min round trip, plus say 10min to find the book, a place to sit, etc; call it 30-70min. If you value your time at say, $10/hr, that's $5-12. Then there's the cost of transportation. If the library/bookstore is three miles away, 6mi. round trip, and gas costs $2.50/gal., and you get 20mi/gal., that's another $.75. The IRS figures driving a car costs $.405/mile in repairs, wearing it out, etc., so that's another $2.40. So you're at something like $8-15 to go read a "free" book.
Really -- if it were that free, people would do a lot more of it.
Yet reading a free copy from a CDS doesn't have those limitations. It is much closer to $0, actually and truly free. THAT's the problem.
(4) You can't pass on a "free" copy you read in the store or from the library. You have to leave the book at the bookstore (or buy it); you have to return the book to the library. Reading a book in digital form that was stolen from a CDS, you could pass that copy on to others by email, via a web page, P2P software, etc.
So, bottom line, bookstore/library reading isn't really free. CDS copies are essentially free, and that's the problem. They're too convenient to read free.
This is one of the reasons we formed the COCOA Association ( http://www.copyrightaccess.com/ ), to make more copyrighted work available. (Note, COCOA does not inhibit indexing and searching and returning text snippet search results -- just what page images can be displayed.) If you support this, please sign our petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/cocoa/petition.html -- thanks!
Dr. Andrew Burt,
Chair, The COCOA Association
Respectfully disagree, for the typical case. If you have access to a tightly targeted market, sure, you can do it yourself. But for your average fiction book or garden variety non-fiction where the author isn't tied into the readership, and the author's expectation is that it will be on bookshelves across America, it is emphatically not true that one can compete with the major publishers in cost effectively printing and distributing books:
If you want to get your book on the shelves of every real bookstore in the country, you're looking at printing and shipping (and taking back, with return shipping on your nickel) say 10-20,000 copies. Let's go with 10,000 for example. Let's say you go with a trade paper edition from some reasonable POD outfit like LuLu (who probably ties into Lightning like I'd guess PA does too). Setup at LuLu is free -- you plop over your text. (Now, you ought to have paid for real copyediting, and formatting it right for print will take time or you can pay someone, and there's decent cover art, so let's say you put a piddly $1,000 into that. Your cost as author to purchase copies is, say, $8, and you want them in 10,000 stores, so you've got shipping to each store (media rate is $1.42 for a pound or under), plus the shipping envelopes at say $25c in bulk, so let's say $2 each to ship, plus you'll probably get half of them returned (50% returns meaning you've done well!), at another $2 shipping to you, so that's another $1 a copy average to factor in -- so $8+2+1=$11/copy in costs. So, you've printed and shipped 10,000 copies at $11, costing you $110,000 up front before you can see a dime ($111k with your other costs). (That's not counting your *time* in shipping these out -- at 5min a package including time at the post office, that's 100 8-hour days!) Now, the bookstore (or a distributor like Ingram) wants aroundabout a 50% discount off cover price, so if you want to get back that $11 with say $1 profit, you'll have to put the list price at around $24. If you're lucky and sell half of them, you get back, many months later, half your books that didn't sell (5,000 copies) plus payment for those that sold of 5,000 x $12 = $60,000.
Oops, you just lost $50,000.
POD, like PublishAmerica, is only economically feasible if you don't have the copies on bookstore shelves. But if you don't have the copies on store shelves, you have an incredibly hard time selling your book. (In -most- cases; exceptions are as you say.)
How does a real publisher make money at this? Volume discounts: They don't have to pay the high costs per copy for the printing, and for the shipping they lump copies of different titles together. They subsidize losses from titles that don't break even by having bestsellers that sell tons of copies (thus effectively near-zero returns). Yes, publishers often lose money on titles, especially titles from new authors. (Whom they hope will get a following and sell better in the future.)
Sad to say, but as a one-title self-publisher, it's extraordinarily difficult to make a profit. You might make a hundred bucks, but to really sell to the mass public you risk tens of thousands of dollars. Real publishers do this for you, because they believe in the book (that it'll make them and you both money). PublishAmerica is most definitely not a "traditional" publisher. Go see how many of their titles you can find in your local Barnes & Noble, compared to Random House, Tor, etc. (Lucky if you can fine one title, and if you do, chances are it's a local author and only carried in that one store.)
This isn't changing until we have *real* e-books (i.e. outselling paper books), and even then, you'll have to get Eyeballs on Product or you won't sell.
Alas. But it's PA's claims that they are "traditional" -- and the false hopes they create therefrom -- that get people's bile up.
--Andrew Burt
(VP, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.)
I see no connection between the quality of the writing of the folks who run http://www.writerbeware.org/ and their low opinions of PublishAmerica.
This began, years back, with some well-respected SF authors chiding PublishAmerica for misleading statements (which Atlanta Nights proves :-), and PublishAmerica wanting to call them names.
When you parse out the (il)logic of that quote from PublishAmerica, they're saying anyone who picks on them is a bad writer and disreputable scum. :-)
In actuality, the ones pointing out the PublishAmerica isn't what they claim are folks who do an enormous amount of work to help aspiring writers get published, educate them about how publishing works, and what to avoid. They've put scammers behind bars, and deserve a lot of credit for "paying forward" (helping the next generation succeed). Check out http://www.writerbeware.org/, compare to the hype at http://www.publishamerica.com/, and make up your own mind.
--Andrew Burt
(VP of SFWA, for which WriterBeware is SFWA's Committee on Writing Scams)
What separates the real publishers from the rest are that they put their neck out for the author financially. They get thousands of copies printed, not knowing if they'll sell, and they pay the shipping to the stores, and are willing to take the copies back if they don't sell (called "returns") for free, even paying the shipping back. Self-published books don't have the margin in them to allow for that. By the time you factor in a little money for the author, the printing costs, shipping, etc. for a returnable book, the cost has risen higher than readers usually will pay. So if you have a market you can tap, terrific, go for it, self-publishing can be your friend. If you haven't the ability to tap a large enough market, then self-publishing won't make you any serious money.
I think this will substantially change for the better with the advent of inexpensive "digital paper" products, i.e. that act like a book in the ways mass consumers want [which ebooks demonstrably don't today -- or they'd sell like paper books]. At the point where you have a "real book" with rifflable pages but digital ink, cheap enough for most folks to afford -- let's say 10-20 years from now -- then this whole picture will change in dramatic ways. But we're not there yet.
And even then: what will remain a constant is the need to get Eyeballs on Product. Marketing and advertising will always be expensive so long as the "human input bandwidth" is limited like it is.
Bottom line, though -- what this sting was about: PublishAmerica makes it seem like all an author needs to do to make a living from writing is get their words into print. The reality is that a real publisher invests a lot of money into getting Eyeballs on Product, and that's the only way most books make any significant money. If PublishAmerica just made it clear how unlikely it was to make money from self-publishing, unless you have the ability to tap into a large market (which very few authors do), I doubt WriterBeware and those of us who are "Travis Tea" would have done this. SFWA and WriterBeware have a long history of helping and educating aspiring authors. Self-publishing/POD is a tool that only works well in the right (and rather limited) circumstances -- but PublishAmerica misleads authors about that, and that's what makes us mad. (If PublishAmerica has 223 new titles each month [78 new authors/mo + 145 second books/mo, from their page at http://www.publishamerica.com/facts/index.htm], each selling an average of say 100 copies over its entire lifetime, selling for say $15 each, PublishAmerica has revenues of 223*100*15 ~ $330,000/mo or $4M/year. Each author, on the other hand, gets an 8% royalty [per PA's contract] from that $15, or $1.20, for $120 total income from their book. Draw your own conclusions.)
If PA quit calling themselves a "traditional" publisher -- or acted like one, vetting work for salability because their neck is on the line and paying out advances of thousa
--Andrew Burt
.34 [I wrote the software used to generate the gibberish in chapter 34])
(TravisTea.11 and sort of