Google

Shakespeare: Google's Newest Project

Category: Google

Google has just launched a new website, spun from the Google Book Search model, devoted solely to the writings of Shakespeare.

Now visitors can view the entire works of all the great bard's famous titles including: "Love's Labor Lost," "The Comedy of Errors," and "Hamlet."

From MSNBC:

"Users can even plug in words, such as "to be or not to be" from "Hamlet," and immediately be taken to that part of the play.

The site, which was introduced in conjunction with Google's sponsorship of New York's "Shakespeare in the Park," also provides links to related scholarly research, Internet groups, and even videos of theater performances of Shakespeare plays."

Read the entire article here, or visit Google's new site here.

Posted by Tess Strand Alipour , June 15, 06, 8:35 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Google Book Search Under Brit Fire

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google

British publishers have now joined the argument against Google's Book Search.

From article:
"Lynne Brindley, chief executive of The British Library, didn't appear surprised that Google has found itself at odds with the established print industry.

'There's not necessarily a coincidence of interest between search engines and copyright holders,' said Brindley.

Laurie Kaye of Laurence Kaye Solicitors backed up this point.

'Commercial players are concerned about the loss of control over their content. Their content database being held on other servers creates uncertainty. I'm not going to go into the legalities of what Google is doing.'"

Find the article, sourced from ZD Net, here.

Posted by Tess Strand Alipour , June 8, 06, 10:21 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Publishers Attempting to Head Off Google

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google

From Information World Review comes this article detailing how the "Major publishers are racing ahead with their alternative offerings to Google Book Search" with Harper Collins Publishing heading up a major effort in a deal with Newsstand, an online media distributor.

Macmillan Publishing is also reportedly working to develop its own online variation "BookStore" beyond the working-prototype stage.

Richard Charkin, chief executive of Macmillan is quoted as saying, "Publishers have to get their act together with the entry of Yahoo and Microsoft into the arena alongside Amazon and Google.?

Find the entire article, with links to more info about Macmillan's effort, here.

Posted by Tess Strand Alipour , May 31, 06, 8:27 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Vinton Cerf: Father Net and Google Exec on Google Book Search

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google , Digital Publishing

Ask and you shall receive: just yesterday we were wondering if anyone had anything to say these days about Google Book Search - and voila, an article from the Washington Post today "Google's Goal: A Worldwide Web of Books" talks to Vinton Cert, famous for his participation in the founding of the internet and current Google exec, about his own "dead-tree" book collection and thoughts on digitizing.

Find the article here.

Posted by Tess Strand Alipour , May 18, 06, 7:13 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Google Blogs Book Search

Category: Google , Metadata

Google's got yet another blog running, to add to the already existing 22 some-odd blogs - this one "Inside Google Book Search" looks at what's going on in the Google Book Search (previously 'Google Print') Project - something we've not heard much news on lately, particularly from the publishing sector.
What IS going on with Google's project these days?
According to the site, with the "Sample Pages View" - "If the publisher of author has given us permission, users can see a limited number of pages from the book." and with the "Full Book View" - visitors can read the entire book via Google Book Search "...if the book is out of copyright, or if the publisher or author has asked to make the book fully viewable."

With 'buy this book' and 'find this book in a local library' links Google Book Search is much more than a digital card catalog and extract repository.

In an attempt to curb any negative publicity regarding copyright issues with the project, the site also hosts a News and Views section where authors, publishers, and readers, etc. can and have shared their project participation 'success stories.'
In further defense of the project Google writes, "Some of our critics believe that somehow Google Book Search will become a substitute for the printed word. To the contrary, our goal is to improve access to books ? not to replace them...

Copyright law is supposed to ensure that authors and publishers have an incentive to create new work, not stop people from finding out that the work exists. By helping people find books, we believe we can increase the incentive to publish them. After all, if a book isn't discovered, it won't be bought."

Posted by Tess Strand Alipour , May 17, 06, 7:13 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine on Book Scanning and the Digital Library

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google , E-commerce , Digital Publishing

From The New York Times Magazine comes "Scan This Book! " a fascinating insider's analysis on the future of the digital book, the concept of a universal library, and the publishing industry's lawsuit against Google's book digitization project.

"The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages...

Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone ? the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time."

Read the article in full, here.

Posted by Tess Strand Alipour , May 15, 06, 7:16 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Google Has Taken the Hit

Category: Copyright Law , Google

this time around, as a California judge ruled against the internet mega-company for violating the copyrights of an adult entertainment website by displaying thumbnail images from the site in it's image search results.
The court's analysis of the circumstances, as well as the final ruling, was based in part on "Kelly vs. Arriba Soft Corp." a previous case that left a thumbnail/copyright issue law on the books in 2003.

The court also looked at Section 107 of the Copyright Act which states:
"The reproduction of a copyrighted work will not constitute infringement of the copyright if the use is for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research." This fair use doctrine also lists four factors to evaluate whether a particular use is fair: "(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." 17 U.S.C. §107."

For a detailed legal analysis of the court's decision on "Perfect 10 vs. Google" from the San Deigo Source, click here.

Posted by Tess Strand Alipour , May 3, 06, 8:23 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Google in Chinese = Gu Ge

Category: Google

Actually, Gu Ge means "song of the harvest of grain" but soon the word will be synonymous with Google as it eases into China's branch of the web at Google.cn with full compliace of the country's censorship laws.

Read more about the new Google name and what it means for China, Google, and the web in general here.

Posted by Tess Strand Alipour , April 13, 06, 7:36 AM , comments(0) , permalink

You say matzah, I say matzoh

Category: Google

An interesting observation by David Weinberger: Type "matzah" into Google, and get nearly 600,000 hits; type "matzoh" (a correct variant spelling) and get 325,000 hits. More reasons librarians go nuts.

Not to bash Google too much - how did I find that article about Wise Birds, anyway...? However, this is just a blog. If it were a research paper, I'd want the BEST article about librarianship and information literacy. This might be it, but I have no idea.

Posted by Laura Dawson , March 22, 06, 6:01 PM , comments(0) , permalink

Lou Dobbs is a Blithering Idiot

Category: Copyright Law , Google , Friedman-Dobbs Smackdown

This time I didn't say it... did. For a great debate on Friedman vs. Dobbs, check here.

The goddessly , meanwhile, continues to feed me fun tidbits. In France, we hear that it is NOT fair use to make a backup copy of a DVD. However, the real fun is still with Google. Apparently a porn site is suing Google over fair-use issues - Google displays this site's "intellectual property" (sorry) in its Google Image search. Why subscribe to the porn site if you can get the images for free? Google argues that it merely displays thumbnail images, but according to this article, "Perfect 10's lawyers argued that the thumbnails, which it notes are quite a bit larger than the average thumbnail, have value to the magazine because it sells small images to a British cell phone company.

Curiouser and curiouser. We like us a good IP rumble.

Posted by Laura Dawson , March 3, 06, 10:23 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Information Wants to Be Paid for By Advertising

Category: Google , Metadata

Silicon.com reports today that the World Association of Newspapers is going to "challenge the exploitation of content" by search engines by...well, they haven't decided what they're going to do yet. They're French.

But their argument is similar to what a lot of publishers and authors are arguing regarding Google Print - that even the metadata required for listing a product (whether it's a book, a news story, or any other piece of intellectual property) is worth something. A headline (or book title), a photo (or a picture of the book jacket), a little blurb on what the thing is about - that's enough to get an advertiser interested. Will publishers and authors see any revenue from ads on Google? Will newspapers likewise see any revenue from ads on search engines?

The search engine's argument is that it provides "exposure" for products like books and music and news stories, and it's up to the publisher to actually SELL the stuff and make THEIR share of the money. The cost of listing is paid for by ads. In other words, what Google does with your metadata is their business.

This comes up at meetings with publishers periodically - can anyone claim ownership of metadata, or is it in the public domain? The fact that a news story is about orange groves - can someone make that determination and say, "I own the relationship of this news story to that subject of orange groves"?

Or is making that relationship considered creative and copyrightable work? Someone else could read the story and say, "That story's about the effects of hurricanes on local economies."

The more search engines are capable of doing, the more interesting copyright law is going to get.

Posted by Laura Dawson , February 1, 06, 1:46 PM , comments(0) , permalink

Fair Use

Category: Copyright Law , Google , Metadata , E-commerce

I got an email the other day from a client who aggregates content for redistribution - this email was from a company called XB90.com. They are a company that goes around swiping bloggers' RSS feeds without approval/permission (and certainly no compensation), and then if you don't wish to participate in their distribution service (which is also free), you have to "opt out".

Kind of like Google Print's reading of copyright law- "we have the right to copy and distribute your stuff unless you tell us not to."

No, folks, that is not the way it works. XB90.com's site is down today, but there are plenty of others who step into the vacuum. Om Malik has a great piece on this - and as usual, all roads lead back to Google - in this case, the AdSense program.

At some point someone's going to realize that great content is not just a vehicle for advertising, but a product in and of itself.

Posted by Laura Dawson , January 2, 06, 2:30 PM , comments(0) , permalink

November 28, 2005

Category: Publishing , Google , Metadata , E-commerce

New York magazine jumps into the Google party this week with a snappy summary of all that's been going on. But it's the London Times that adds a new argument. In an article by a small publisher, it's noted that if Google scans all scholarly books into its databases, even for search purposes, libraries won't need to buy so many books. A user can enter a search term, find the exact books that the search term appears in, and discover whether or not it's even worth cracking the covers of the books - or ordering them via interlibrary loan. The number of books in any given library will decrease - there will be more sharing of titles. And so publishers will find fewer buyers, will publish fewer books, etc. etc.

In other news, we're back on the GDSN train - trying to synch up book databases so they can be used by grocery stores, drugstores, other-than-bookstores. Why is this such an obsession: well, anybody who's been to my house has seen all my books. I am a far worse book fiend than shoe fiend - and I have an impressive shoe collection. Stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Wegman's, Publix - these are selling books now, as we all know. What some of us might not know is that they are selling a tremendous number of books. All using data that's insufficient, inaccurate, and in some cases barely even there. Still, they are managing to keep the book industry pockets pretty well lined in ways that traditional booksellers seem not to be able to do.

So why the push on data?

Because if the book industry cannot continue to make it easier for those stores to sell books - if the book industry cannot get its shit together and present non-traditional book outlets with good sales data, there's gonna be no incentive for them to continue to sell books. Books will be replaced by DVDs, music, video games, magazines, whatever stores find (when they finally wake up) is easiest to sell - and good data makes a thing easy to sell. And then, we'll find, we'll have made it harder for people to buy books. We're already competing for mind-share here, folks. Why make it more difficult on ourselves?

Posted by Laura Dawson , November 28, 05, 2:53 PM , comments(0) , permalink

Open for Business

Category: Copyright Law , Google

Folks, get'cher book searches here - Google Print is open for business. Launching today over the hue and cry from publishers and authors, the long-awaited book search component offers full-text-searchability for thousands and thousands of titles. Google itself has proudly blogged here. Now they just have to get U.S. copyright law changed, and they'll be good to go.

Meanwhile, in less-publicized news, Amazon has announced it is selling books BY THE PAGE. Useful for those who only need a chapter, who would otherwise either have to buy the whole book or (far, far more likely) wouldn't buy the book at all. Great incremental sales.

Microsoft, not to be left out, announced a partnership with the British Library to scan its public-domain titles - some 75 million items - although its agreement with the British Library is a little fuzzy as to the distribution of that content.

So many books...so many copyright laws...so little time....And they told me being an English major was useless.

Posted by Laura Dawson , November 3, 05, 5:16 PM , comments(0) , permalink

Google Print: Bandit or Robin Hood?

Category: Copyright Law , Google

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Commons movement, chimes in not a moment too soon on the Google debate. In the Sydney Morning Herald:

Professor Lessig makes the point that if Google Print is illegal, so is Google
itself. Google is simply indexing and organising text, which is what any library
does. The fact that it is using the internet to do so is irrelevant - it just
makes it easier to do what any visitor to a physical library does. All that's
changed is the technology, which means the old ways need to be re-examined.

The article largely covers Tim O'Reilly's stance on copyright and piracy (wherein O'Reilly says, wisely, "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy"). But this is an interesting thought and one we've been advocating for quite some time - yes, Google Print is a violation of copyright law. Absolutely. But does that mean the project should not go forward? Not necessarily. Digitizing the text of every book you can get your hands on and putting it in a search database is of course a very useful thing. But when technology bumps up against deep legal tradition, interesting things happen. And frequently the law gets changed.

InfoToday reports that Microsoft is getting in on the book-digitization act (of course) starting with public-domain works. (Now THERE'S a risk - how many different iterations of Jane Eyre are out on the web? By my count, there are at least 6 on the first two pages of a Google search. How many do we NEED?)

Posted by Laura Dawson , November 1, 05, 9:47 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Too Busy Working to Blog

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google , Metadata

Right, so we won't call October our most productive month ever, blog-wise, though work-wise there's a whole lotta shakin' going on. But there are some good things to report: Muze is looking for a few . Muze is a fun company to work for - I enjoyed my time there considerably.

Google continues its steamrolling of the book industry. On 10/27, several librarians in the CUNY system and I gave a presentation at BMCC, where we each tackled a separate facet of the Google presence in libraries. This is an ongoing project (in other words, more presentations, articles, etc.), but in the short term you can access my bit of it here. (Thanks, Hamid!)

The Charleston Conference is next week, and I will be on the Batphone on Saturday discussing publishers and ISBN-13.

We're treading water here, not suffering from lack of business but from lack of FUN NEWS! us your squibs, people - Tess and I can't do it alone....

Posted by Laura Dawson , October 31, 05, 5:03 PM , comments(0) , permalink

Who's Your Copyright Holder?

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google

PW Daily reports that the AAP has filed suit against Google, joining the Author's Guild in defining the next step in copyright law. Notes PW:

As a way of accomplishing the legal use of copyrighted works in the Library
Project, AAP proposed to Google that they utilize the ISBN numbering system
to identify works under copyright and secure permission from publishers and
authors to scan these works. Google rejected the offer.

And given the past history of technology/copyright/antitrust lawsuits, judges are notoriously bad at understanding issues like this. Will Google have the right to put copyrighted materials in a database for the purpose of search only, without obtaining permission from the copyright holder, or will they have to go around and solicit individual permissions for this purpose? And will that prove prohibitively expensive in terms of time and resources?

Cool.

Posted by Laura Dawson , October 19, 05, 12:00 PM , comments(0) , permalink

Okay okay okay

Category: Google

Yes, yes, I know. I KNOW. I've been out slaying dragons and I haven't had two seconds to think. Thanks to the goddessly , whose gentle proddings interrupted the snicker-snack of my vorpal blade and reminded me that it's been ELEVEN DAYS since my last post, an unforgivable lapse in blog-land.

And what has gone on in those last eleven days...My brother, a hardware engineer for Sun, hints at big things to come with the Google/Sun partnership - bypassing the need for Microsoft altogether, a longtime dream of Scott McNealy. Google's expressed an interest in AOL - having an in with AOL's subscribers would allow Google to...well, continue taking over the world. The boys at ZDnet have got it all figured out here, though personally I find that sort of figuring to resemble John Madden scribbling on a blackboard - thoroughly incomprehensible.

All this tectonic shifting of software/portal/search engines will inevitably result in an earthquake. The blogs are filled with salivating puppies wagging their tails in anticipation of THE BIG SHAKEOUT. Predictions abound. Yawn.

On the Google Print front: a great article posted on the BBC website. Cogently argued, this piece advocates changing copyright law to allow for scanning entire books for the purposes of search - that trying to have the Google Print debate in the current legal environment is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. The landscape has shifted, and the law needs to account for that.

Posted by Laura Dawson , October 14, 05, 11:05 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Making Mama Happy

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google

8 minutes ago, the AP released this juicy little tidbit:

Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. is setting out to build a vast online library of copyrighted books that pleases publishers ? something rival Google Inc. hasn?t been able to achieve.

"That pleases publishers" - good luck. At any rate, the Open Content Alliance is the name of this project, which Yahoo is building in conjunction with a number of other partners. Says the Yahoo spokesman (interestingly named Mandelbrot):

Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors.

Which means the archive will be rather small. But Pat Schroeder is happy, and we all know when Mama's happy, everybody's happy.

Posted by Laura Dawson , October 3, 05, 11:28 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Once more around the Google bush

Category: Copyright Law , Google , E-commerce

Via the goddessly Tess....Missing the point entirely is Xeni Jardin, in an editorial in the LA Times.

If Google has its way, [the Authors' Guild] logic goes, we'll lose control over who can copy our work, and we'll lose sales. But Internet history proves the opposite is true. Any product that is more easily found online can be more easily sold.

True - any product that is more easily found online can be more easily sold. But this is not about sales. This is about copyright law. This is what seems to be the crux of so many arguments - the conflation of sales with law.

Again, I'm waiting for the Library of Congress and the US Copyright Office to jump in here, and so far, they haven't.

Also in the Sunday NY Times, Randall Stross talks up AOL's strengths, which can be summarized thusly: Lazy subscribers. Don't want to give up that AOL email address....

At its membership core are the subscribers who chose the service because it made going online easy and insulated them from the unknown. These members have become comfortable where they are.

That will only take a company so far, frankly. Newspaper companies have been debating this for years, as more and more papers launch full-scale online presences...for free. Says Walker Lundy, formerly of the Philadelphia Inquirer, on Romenesko:

There's an old expression that I think fits this situation; I think newspaper companies are eating their seed corn. I fear for their future because you just can't save your way into profit increases every year. If you're running a steak house, you still have to serve them steak.

One could say similar things about AOL. Until they offer something new, something that nobody else has, something that many people want, then they are...an also-ran. The rest is just creative accounting.

Posted by Laura Dawson , September 26, 05, 9:30 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Googliscious

Category: Copyright Law , Google

Internetnews.com carries a story that explains more fully what Google's interpretation of "fair use" actually is.

Jonathan Band [an IP lawyer and expert on digital content] said that search engines rely on the concept of implied license for their Web indexing, assuming that webmasters have posted information online because they want it to be found. He pointed out that Web masters could place exclusion headers in their site code, telling crawlers to keep off.

"By giving publishers the opportunity to opt-out of the Print Library Project, Google is replicating the exclusion feature of the Internet," he concluded.

Which makes perfect sense. Except what Google's talking about replicating is not already on the web - which is the whole point of Google Print. What Google's doing is creating that online information database in the first place, and THEN indexing it. The indexing part is fine. It's creating the vast pool of unlicensed data to crawl in the first place that's up for debate.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation equates what Google is doing to creating a card catalog. Which, again, is PART of what Google is doing. The OTHER part of what Google is doing is copying books into digital format so that they can index keywords, subject matter, etc. It's that "copying books into digital format" part that's got publishers' and authors' panties in a twist.

Now, if the publishers and authors were already doing this, and posting that content online for Google to crawl, that'd be one thing. But that is not what's going on here.

Personally, I think the idea of a massive digital database of all the books Google can get hold of is a great idea. I love the idea of being able to locate books as well as journal articles, blogs, personal websites, what have you.

But I do find the opting-out-of-scanning to be a little disturbing. I understand that the entire book won't be posted online and nobody's going to lose out. But that little frisson of "we had to copy your work for our project and we couldn't find you easily to get permission so we just went ahead and did it - if you don't want that, let us know" to be a little...well, it assumes that the value of Google Print is worth more than the value of an author's individual copyright.

And that's not how we operate under copyright law.

If Google were to work with the Library of Congress, for example, that might be a different story entirely. Because all books which are copyrighted must be on deposit with the Library of Congress. If Google were to strike a deal with LC, and work WITH them, then perhaps we wouldn't be in this little pickle now.

Posted by Laura Dawson , September 23, 05, 8:56 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Now We're Getting Somewhere

Category: Copyright Law , Google

Finally, Google's going to court. Shelf Awareness tells us this morning:

Three authors and the Authors Guild filed suit against Google yesterday, charging that the company's program to scan millions of books in several major libraries and make the texts searchable online constitutes "massive copyright infringement."

According to Search Engine Journal,

Google is asking publishers to ?opt-out? of the Google Print program during the next 2 months if the publishers do not want their books indexed in Google Print. Interesting tactic, especially since the whole idea behind copyrighting is to be legally opted out of anyone copying your works - even Google.

Google has of course responded in their own blog on the issue. And to a degree, they have a point - if they are only posting snippets consistent with fair use conventions, then it's not such a big deal.

BUT...the trouble is, Google is not SCANNING snippets. They are scanning entire books for the purpose of their search engine - so that the search engine will make sure to pick up salient keywords that appear throughout the text of the book.

Even this is not so egregious...except that scanning the entire text of a book requires permissions. The libraries in question - Stanford, Harvard, et al - are giving THEIR permission. But is it the libraries' permission to give? Or is it the copyright holders' permission to give?

Google tells publishers, "If you don't want us to scan your titles, then tell us and we won't." But by doing that, publishers have to either enroll in Google Print as a partner (in a negative sense - a partner who is withholding titles from Google Print) - and thus become part of press releases and whatnot, whenever Google feels like letting the world know who its partners are (even if that partnership consists of not partnering - George Orwell is having a field day with this one).

OR, publishers have to let Google know in some abbreviated format not to scan their titles. I've taken a look at the form. Copyright holders are submitting books for EXCLUSION. How does one submit anything for exclusion? Isn't the point of exclusion NOT SUBMITTING?

The more convoluted this language gets, the more I have to see the Authors' Guild's point. Yes, the cat's out of the bag - Google's going to digitize books and publishers have to get used to this. But that's not to say that publishers shouldn't have the option of not getting used to it if they don't feel like it - and take the consquences. Google's trying to force this issue by going to libraries and doing an end-run around publishers and authors is...ill-conceived at best.

Posted by Laura Dawson , September 21, 05, 8:13 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Raving Nutballs Occasionally Make Sense

Category: Google , Friedman-Dobbs Smackdown

A political burp: Lou Dobbs has adopted the party line about the Katrina refugees in New Orleans. Statistically, that's about right; nobody can be all whacked all the time. Now back to the nutshow.

Fortunately, Anderson Cooper is a tonic to everything - and I do mean everything - as he sticks it to the powers that be. Only a Dalton-educated, Vanderbilt-heir, prematurely grey, blue-eyed white CNN boy could do what he did. Wonkette calls him "Secretary of Take-No-Shit". Amen, sister. We love our Anderson.

All right - business as usual. Google - expanding to Europe. Horse out of barn, train out of station, cat out of bag, metaphor of your choice. Horse-train-cat not going back in again. What did I tell you.

Posted by Laura Dawson , September 2, 05, 7:56 PM , comments(0) , permalink

Making Sense of Google

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google

What Google's Doing: Making deals with libraries (so far, Harvard, Stanford, and University of Michigan) to scan the entire contents of their stacks - copyrighted and public domain alike. When a user searches on Google, the result that comes up for copyrighted material is a squib of text, a bibliographic listing, and links to purchase the book. But in order to do that much (and to feed the search engine) Google has to scan the text of the entire book and hold that text in its database to search against.

Why the AAP Objects: Because it means that Google is holding the entire texts of copyrighted books in a database that could potentially leak; because it means that Google is soliciting ads based on copyrighted material and not compensating percentages of that ad revenue to the copyright holders (authors, publishers, etc.).

What Happens Next: Well, right now the AAP and Google are talking and not telling us anything. It's an interesting debate, though - whereas publishers used to control copyrights, now in some cases libraries are also serving as a gateway. What happens if Harvard gives Google permission to scan the text of a Wiley book that Wiley has not consented to share with Google? Does Wiley then threaten not to sell its books to Harvard?

I see this as being very similar to the used-books phenomenon - publishers want to get paid for the life of a book as long as it's viable. They want a percentage of the sale of used books; they want a percentage of the revenue generated by a huge search engine like Google. It's useful to look at the music industry for indications as to where this is going - the iPod proves that the Napster horse has left the barn, and similarly it's just a question of what terms the publishers will work out with Google and with libraries that Google's doing business with. In other words, this latest fracas isn't exactly a showstopper; it's more like a pothole.

Posted by Laura Dawson , August 15, 05, 5:47 PM , comments(0) , permalink

The Google Threat

Category: Google , Metadata , E-commerce , Friedman-Dobbs Smackdown

10 years ago, Amazon was poised to take over the world...with a homepage that looked like . With content updated daily, an e-newsletter service, and a million titles for sale...everyone in the book world was wary. Who was this guy - the book industry is fairly incestuous and nobody had ever heard of this clown Bezos before. Where was he getting his money? And what was Amazon going to turn into?

That last question was the most disturbing of all. At B&N, trying not to outpace the competition but simply catch up, not knowing what Amazon would do next was unnerving, to say the least. But it wasn't simply about competition - what was Amazon selling, exactly? Books, yes. Information? Content? News? Was it a bookstore, or a magazine that sold books? What should B&N try to be?

Ultimately, the dust settled on these questions. Now Amazon is not the bogeyman it used to be. For that, we have Google.

Moby Live's guest essay this week is the garbled latest in "sky is falling - and it's all Google's fault" kvetching. As with the issue of outsourcing (Lou Dobbs, don't even get me started), the question is not whether gathering information about users and what they're searching on should happen. It is happening. The salient question is, how should that be handled?

Haven't seen too many essays about that. Anyone wants to send me one, you know where to reach . I'd be grateful to leave all the kvetching behind.

Posted by Laura Dawson , July 12, 05, 9:54 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Putting the Toothpaste Back in the Tube

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google

The Guardian this morning reports on the fuss raised by publishers over Google Print - the nonstory that will not die.

Google, as usual, is well ahead of its time on this one - and as with most ideas whose time has not yet come, this one is most difficult to explain, much less get buy-in. (As my knowledgeable colleague the Data Queen tells me, "People keep explaining it to me and I understand it, but then because the public is at least ten or fifteen years away from the mental shift required to make it a success...I promptly forget what it is.") The AAP is apparently asking Google to stop scanning in titles for six months till they can establish the legality of what they're doing - concerns over piracy abound, not necessarily from web users, but from those who are handling the files.

Which makes about as much sense as publishers being afraid their printers will steal the text of their books and sell those illegally. Or being afraid that people will plop down in a big chair in Barnes & Noble and read a book onsite rather than buying it and taking it home. Or being afraid of libraries.

Google Print is just another way of categorizing and distributing - and ultimately selling - books. As with any sales channel, there are risks (anytime you invent something new, you invent the peril that comes with it - inventing a car necessarily invents the car accident; inventing an airplane necessarily invents the plane crash). Trying to stop the progress of invention, however, is not simply foolish - it's pointless. Asking Google to stop scanning for a while, so as to figure out what injunction to slap them with, is a little silly. Better to spend the effort on working with Google to invent better security for those files.

Posted by Laura Dawson , June 27, 05, 9:37 AM , comments(0) , permalink

Watching Bowker Reinvent Itself

Category: Google , Metadata

Bowker's got a tough row to hoe these days, as companies like Ingram, Baker & Taylor, et al license their data for use on the web. Years ago, they were the only bibliographic-data game in town. But the competition's gotten stiffer - even librarians are looking things up on Amazon.com rather than checking the BIP database. A few months ago, I was giving a presentation to some independent presses, and one guy asked me, "What's the point of Bowker these days?"

Apart from being the US ISBN agency, which is crucial business for them now that the ISBN is changing to 13 digits, Bowker's been forced to find new markets. And I think that their latest effort - hooking up with Content Directions, and turning ISBNs into DOIs - is a very smart move on their part. As more and more publishers sign on to the Google Print project, those DOIs are going to improve search results and make Googling books even stronger.

Very strategic, and great timing. I'm impressed.

Posted by Laura Dawson , June 6, 05, 3:31 PM , comments(0) , permalink

BEA - the aftermath

Category: Publishing , Google , E-commerce , Friedman-Dobbs Smackdown , Industry Events

Well, that was exhausting.

The numbers aren't out yet for BEA attendance, but I can personally attest that it was impossible to move on Friday. The general consensus was that this is good - but let's remember that this is New York, that US publishing is still by and large located in and around New York, and...well, I don't even have to finish this sentence....

Things got saner on Saturday. The talk of my particular stratum of the crowd was the article in the NYT Book Review about co-op - an article which runs in the NYT periodically, in various flavors, and which IS NOT NEWS. Deciding to get scandalized about it now is a little like finding a glimpse of stocking something shocking.

One swift spank to the Times - they know better over there.

The man of the show appeared to be Tom Turvey of Google Print - standing-room-only at "Google University", and at the publishers' presentation on Thursday the moderator had to keep reminding the audience to stop asking Turvey questions and to direct their inquiries to the publishers working with Google Print.

Underrated - the series of presentations on publishing in China, co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Publishing, also on Thursday, were not as well attended as they should have been. My friends, Robert Baensch is a prescient man. The Chinese are flocking to the cities from the provinces. What does this mean? It's not rocket science - more education. Huge market for books over there. Huge appetite for work over there (can you say "outsourcing"?). A burgeoning labor-and-information market. And meanwhile we sit here wringing our hands over...CO-OP???

Wait - I have to spank the Times one more time.

Posted by Laura Dawson , June 5, 05, 1:09 PM , comments(0) , permalink

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