Google is open for bookselling

After various announcements and delays, Google's bookstore is now open for business in the US.  Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC technology correspondent, is impressed.  Read his blog post on this here

Key comments:

• 'Booksellers and publishers are pretty desperate to see the arrival of a service which could provide real competition for the Kindle store, and prevent Amazon from building a virtual monopoly in the electronic bookselling market here.'
• 'You can read Google's books online,  in the cloud, or you can download them to read across a number of devices - on a computer, on an Apple iPhone or iPad, on any number of phones or tablet computers running Google's Android operating system. One place you can't read them, of course, is a Kindle. '
• 'Publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have had plenty of run-ins with Amazon over pricing, so they are enthusiastic about another route to the electronic market.'
• Booksellers are enthusiastic because Google is offering independent booksellers a chance to sell e-books through its new service.  Currently, if you're an independent bookseller, it's hard to compete with Waterstones or Amazon on e-books.

British Library ebook project

More than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free to the public. Amazon Kindle users will be able to read well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors.  The library’s ebook project is another important event in the book world where the influence and longer term effects of ebooks on the publishing market is an unknown quantity. It is funded by Microsoft. Other online services, such as Google Books, offer out-of-copyright works for free; users of the British Library service will be able to read from pages in the original books in the library’s collection.  Most downloadable books on the Kindle are by contemporary authors because they are the most profitable for publishers. The jury is still out on what to charge for out of copyright works.  The British Library ebooks will be free of charge and will include works by Dickens and Hardy.  It will also be possible to purchase printed copies from Amazon which will have the original typeface and illustrations. Whether this will ‘revolutionise access the world’s greatest library resources’ as the library’s chief executive claimed is another matter – it may be that the real value is not in the availability of works which are already easily accessible at low or zero cost through other means – local libraries, bookshops, people’s own bookshelves – but in the digital versions of those works which are rare, or to which access in the British  Library is difficult for researchers outside the UK.  The library intends to continue its digitisation scheme by scanning books out of copyright from the early 20th century.

Google Book Search Settlement Agreement

Google reached agreement with American authors and publishers last October in their dispute over the Google Book Search project in which millions of books were made available online. The settlement reached between the parties will allow Google to sell digital versions of copyrighted works that are out of print. The deal is at this stage restricted to the USA and there are some more hoops to jump through yet, but this is a significant move forward for Google. It should be for the publishers too if they manage to put the dispute behind them and, with the flexibility the agreement gives them, start exploring creative ways to develop new products and revenue streams, harnessing the reach and power of Google’s technology.

The settlement with the Author’s Guild is worth US $125 million, US $34.4 million of which will help fund the Book Rights Registry, a copyright collective that will pay authors, their heirs or publishers a share of the profits made by Google. Authors and other owners of copyrighted but out of print books can submit claims to Google before beginning of next year in return for a payment. Google will be able to index the books and display text samples in search results and up to 20% of each book as a preview. Authors and copyright holders will share 63% of advertising and e-commerce revenues associated with their works. The US$125 million is hardly going to break Google’s bank and critics of the project and the settlement may still think that Google have achieved this position by stealth, but publishers are not forced to participate but those which do will help shape an important new marketplace for books.

The agreement broadly covers usage of three types of groups of books:

1 In-copyright and in-print books
By turning on the "preview" and "purchase" models that make their titles more easily available through Book Search, authors and publishers have the potential to grow the online marketplace for their in-print books.

2 In-copyright but out-of-print books
Out-of-print books aren’t actively being published or sold, so the only way to procure one is to track it down in a library or secondhand. This agreement would see every out-of-print book digitized in Google Book Search become available online for preview and purchase, unless the author or publisher chooses to "turn off" that title. Advantage: to enable authors and publishers to earn money from titles considered to be commercially defunct.

3 Out-of-copyright books
Google will continue to allow Book Search users to read, download and print these titles, just as they already do now.

Book publishers aren’t alone in facing up to the challenges of digital. The Google Book Search project is symptomatic of the massive change creative industries are going through, best example of which is the threat to music industry publishers from file sharing sites and digital piracy. We can’t turn back the clock – ebooks are here to stay and we have to learn to how to work with them and tease out the best business models. We can wrap them up in security but that hasn’t helped the music industry particularly; the reality is that hackers will sooner or later break any DRM (security system protecting digital content) – however sophisticated. Some say that the illegal sharing of music online can have the net (forgive the pun) effect of increasing sales of an artist’s albums and other revenues e.g. concert tickets – in other words it’s a type of online marketing for for an artist and if carefully managed it can work. It’s an approach not without risk but the music industry isn’t dead yet and people are still paying to go the cinema, to watch films online and to own DVDs.

For the book industry, the loss of revenue from piracy is not something new. All around the world photocopy shops line the backstreets near universities, busily ‘publishing’ rip-off versions of popular textbooks; in some markets this has lead publishers to price local editions to compete with pirated photocopies. Here though it’s the illegal sharing or selling of digital books that the publishing industry is trying to deal with. Producing a pirated digital copy is a relatively easy task; consider the low cost of scanning from the print (or the procurement of an illegal digital copy from an unscrupulous printer or freelance production person..), not forgetting the close to zero marginal cost of production and distribution.

Publishers can either try to stamp out pirated versions of their copyright (exercise in futility?) while promoting official print titles, or make their own ebooks available in multiple formats for PCs, MACs, the best ebook readers, priced fairly and with a range of options, for example print and ebook combinations, individual chapter sales, subscriptions, sample chapters for free, author interviews, updates. No model has emerged as a winner yet – it’s still early days but ebook sales are growing fast and publishers need to respond to this demand. At the London Book Fair representatives from Sony discussed the prospect of ebook sales overtaking print in terms of when, rather than if.

A final thought on publishers’ uncertainty about the Google Book Search: consider Tim O’Reilly’s comment about the biggest problem facing writers – and by extension their publishers: obscurity – not piracy. Now Mr O’Reilly sells a lot of books and he’s not advocating just giving them all away, but by using the internet and ebooks to make more titles always available (never Out of Print), easier to find and sample, and for sale in multiple formats, projects like Google Book Search should give publishers more options when considering new ways to reach readers with new (and old) books and authors.