Why Publishing Should Send
Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google.
Cory Doctorow:
Google's new Book Search promises to save writers' and publishers' asses by putting their books into the index of works that are visible to searchers who get all their information from the Internet. In response, publishers and writers are suing Google, claiming that this ass-saving is in fact a copyright violation. When you look a little closer, though, you see that the writer/publisher objections to Google amount to nothing more than rent-seeking: an attempt to use legal threats to milk Google for some of the money it will make by providing this vital service to us ink-stained scribblers.
Opponents of Google Book Search (GBS) argue that publishers should have been consulted before their works were scanned, but it's in the nature of fair use that it does not require permission -- that's what a fair use is, a use you make without permission.
They argue that GBS should pay some money to publishers because anyone who makes money off a book should kick some back -- but no one comes after carpenters for a slice of bookshelf revenue. Ford doesn't get money from Nokia every time they sell a cigarette-lighter phone-charger. The mere fact of making money isn't enough to warrant owing something to the company that made the product you're improving.
Here's how GBS works: Google works with libraries to scan in millions of books, most (more than 75 percent) of them out-of-print, some out-of-copyright and some in-print/in-copyright. Google scans these books, converts the scanned images of the pages into text, and indexes the text.
This index will be exposed to the public, who will be able to search the full text of tens of millions of books -- eventually this index could comprise the majority of books ever published -- and get results back reporting on which books contain their search-terms.
For public domain books, the search-results will contain a link to the whole text of the book. These out-of-copyright works are our collective human property -- or no one's property at all -- and Google is perfectly within its rights to distribute copies of any public-domain book that matches a search-request. As an author, I would love to be able to get the full-text of books that matched my search-queries.
For other books -- the books that are in copyright -- Google will show a brief excerpt: a single sentence with one or two sentences from either side of the the match. In some cases, publishers or other copyright holders have granted Google permission to show more than this -- a couple pages -- and Google will show you this, too.
In all cases, Google provides information for buying any book that matches a search-query, provided that the book is in-print. Sadly, most books aren't in print, and for an author, there is no greater professional loss than that arising from not having your works available for sale at all -- this loss far outstrips any conceivable loss from kids with photocopiers, Russian hackers who post ebooks on their websites, or fumble-fingered marketing or PR.
[From BOING, BOING: Read the Rest of the Story]
