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The Google Settlement – From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore
If you think about it, a universal bookstore is a pretty cool idea. Bookstores are wonderful things. Anyone can walk into bookstore, take a book off a shelf, read in it, decide whether to buy it or forget about it, or get it from the library. The settlement announced today by Google, the Association of American Publishers, and the Authors Guild will in time make it possible for millions of books, currently out of print and in-copyright, to be perused, searched and purchased (or not) in an electronic bookstore that will be operated by Google.
The books will come from a number of academic libraries, including the University of Michigan, the University of California, and Stanford University, which have been participants Google Book Search from the beginning, These three worked with Google during the settlement negotiations in an effort to shape the settlement to serve the interests of research libraries and the public, as discussed in a joint press release.
The settlement is complicated, and as people work through it I expect a lively set of discussions and I invite comment on this blog and elsewhere. I’d like to start with what I see as a couple of key points.
First, and foremost, the settlement continues to allow the libraries to retain control of digital copies of works that Google has scanned in connection with the digitization projects. We continue to be responsible for our own collections. Moreover, we will be able to make research uses of our own collections. The huge investments that universities have made in their libraries over a century and more will continue to benefit those universities and the academy more broadly.
Second, the settlement provides a mechanism that will make these collections widely available. Many, including me, would have been delighted if the outcome of the lawsuit had been a ringing affirmation of the fair use rights that Google had asserted as a defense. (My inexpert opinion is that Google’s position would and should have prevailed.) But even a win for Google would have left the libraries unable to have full use of their digitized collections of in-copyright materials on behalf of their own campuses or the broader public. We would have been able, perhaps, to show snippets, as Google has being doing, but it would have been a plain violation of copyright law to allow our users full access to the digitized texts. Making the digitized collections broadly usable would have required negotiations with rightsholders, in some cases book by book, and publisher by publisher. I’m confident that we would have gotten there in time, serving the interests of all parties. But “in time” would surely have been many years, and the clock would have started only at the end of a lawsuit that had many years left to run. Moreover, each library would have had to negotiate use rights to its own collection, still leaving us a long way from a collection of digitized collections that we could all share.
The settlement cuts through this morass. As the product develops, academic libraries will be able to license not only their own digitized works but everyone else’s. Michigan’s faculty and students will be able to read Stanford and California’s digitized books, as well as Michigan’s own. I never doubted that we were going to have to pay rightsholders in order to have reading access to digitized copies of works that are in-copyright. Under the settlement, academic libraries will pay, but will do so without having to bear large and repeated transaction costs. (Of course, saving on transaction costs won’t be of much value if the basic price is too high, but I expect that the prices will be reasonable, both because there is helpful language in the settlement and because of my reading of the relevant markets.)
The settlement is not perfect, of course. It is reminiscent, however, of the original promise of the Google Book project: what once looked impossible or impossibly distant now looks possible in a relatively short period of time. Faculty, students, and other readers will be able to browse the collections of the world ‘s great libraries from their desks and from their breakfast tables. That’s pretty cool.
[...] book settlement announced Google Books announced a settlement with publishers today. Paul Courant is excited about the promise of a universal [...]
October 28, 2008 @ 11:55 am
[...] Paul Courant, the University Librarian at the University of Michigan, has an insightful post: From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore. [...]
October 28, 2008 @ 12:04 pm
[...] Au Courant [...]
October 28, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
This seems like a win-win situation to me. Yes, it’s cool that readers will be able to browse the collections of the world ‘s great libraries. And writers will have the opportunity to share in the revenue generated by their work. That’s also pretty cool. Might even furnish them with the income they need to write more books.
October 28, 2008 @ 12:57 pm
[...] Comments from Paul Courant, University of Michigan’s Dean of Libraries [...]
October 28, 2008 @ 3:07 pm
> Of course, saving on transaction costs won’t be
> of much value if the basic price is too high,
> but I expect that the prices will be reasonable
wait…
you don’t have an idea what the basic price will be?
i thought you were a valued partner in this endeavor?
but they negotiated the price without consulting you?
and they haven’t even informed you about what it is?
that’s not a good sign. that’s not a good sign at all.
-bowerbird
October 28, 2008 @ 5:10 pm
Hey, wait, if the Google Book Search produce allows one to borrow and not own materials, isn’t it more akin to a ‘library’ than a ‘bookstore’? Metaphors can be problems in the way that they offer many facets, some of which inform and some confuse.
October 28, 2008 @ 7:49 pm
however, if you’re charged to “view” a book,
isn’t it more like a bookstore than a library?
except a bookstore where you don’t _own_
what you’ve paid for, you’ve just _rented_ it.
c’mon paul, tell us we haven’t been sold out.
-bowerbird
October 28, 2008 @ 10:11 pm
[...] tiro mais uma vez o chapéu): Olivier Ertzscheid, Sara Lloyd, James Grimmelmann, Kirk Biglione, Paul Courant (o título diz tudo: “The Google Settlement – From the Universal Library to the Universal [...]
October 29, 2008 @ 2:55 am
[...] Paul Courant, “Au Courant” [...]
October 29, 2008 @ 12:23 pm
It’s really more like a switch from “universal library, in snippets, with surveillance, owned by one company but with copies given to the library of origin that they can’t legally use” to “yet another aggregated database that libraries will have to subscribe to, with surveillance, owned by one company but sharing revenue to publishers and authors.”
It’s not really a bookstore, and it never was a library. It’s becoming a vast aggregated database with a middleman collecting and distributing the money libraries pay (and providing a means for individuals to purchase material). And, of course, gathering information about what we’re reading that can be monetized.
October 29, 2008 @ 3:41 pm
[...] books database, perhaps what Paul Courant refers to in his excellent post – The Google Settlement: From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore – as “the product,” will include all out of print books, whether in copyright or not, [...]
October 29, 2008 @ 4:45 pm
Why would Google allow the partners set the prices they were going to charge? They don’t consult them on how much they pay the staffers that work on the project. They don’t consult them on the AdWords rates.
Google might consult them on what they think — as people with experience in the library marketplace — what would be reasonable. They might cut them a deal as compared to institutions that haven’t been partners. But more than that? You all are living in a dream world. This is a business decision and they need to be able to cover costs, including the payments to publishers and authors.
October 29, 2008 @ 9:32 pm
it boils down to this: that’s _our_culture_
in those books. publishers don’t own it,
and google doesn’t own it. _we_ own it.
and we’re not going to let greedy entities
seize hold of it and charge us a _ransom_
to _rent_ it back to us. we’re not stupid…
we’re willing to pay the cost, the _fair_ cost.
but we assume that fair cost will be _low_,
since our intentions are to _fully_leverage_
the power of infinite digital reproducibility.
if you think you can take that away from us,
or just pretend it doesn’t exist, you’re wrong.
that’s the story, morning glory. ignore it
at your own risk…
-bowerbird
October 30, 2008 @ 2:18 am
You know, their agreement with UC requires that they make all PD works available for free, in full-view. But this they are not doing– not only is Google hoarding many pre-1922 scans, but they have an arbitrary 1922 cut-off date for public domain, despite the fact that many pre-1964 books (most) were not legally renewed, and are thus in full PD.
So how is Google going to handle this– charge for full view PD books? In violation of their agreements with the host libraries? Or are they going to renegotiate the agreements to allow them to withhold PD works from free access?
Whatever happens, this settlement only explains why Google was so insistent on scanning copyrighted works in the first place– it was a deliberate business model, to eventually license OOP books for money. The PD scans were just part of the bargain for them– and insisted upon by the host libraries. People shouldn’t forget that– this was never about altruism.
October 30, 2008 @ 4:28 am
[...] Paul Courant, “Au Courant” [...]
October 30, 2008 @ 11:23 am
After looking at the specific terms, here’s some problems I see with it:
1) No ability to download or print-out in-copyright works– which makes it pretty useless for people. You pay for “online access” only. Who wants that?
2) No guarantee that google will continue to allow full downloads of PD works
3) The host libraries who own the books are cut out of the profit deal– this wont last past negotiations…
4) the “free” public library access means designated terminals where you can view books only– again, useless– who reads a books at a terminal?
For student and scholarly purposes, these terms are really inadequate– bordering on insulting, unless people want to go back to the 50s, where patrons line up to get the books, with big notebooks in their hands, scribbling away at a table somewhere, feverishly taking notes.
Without printing or download capabilities, I say send it back to the judge.
In other words, it’s useless.
October 31, 2008 @ 1:54 am
Jim-
A couple of thoughts on your notes:
1) Oddly, I made more or less that same argument about reading online to Paul Courant last week in relation to Brewster Kahle’s presentation at UM. There’s definitely some difference of opinion here, but as a self-identified print fetishist, I’m probably not in the best position to objectively judge the overall interest in electronic books. How well is the Kindle selling? How much business are public libraries who lend e-book readers seeing for those items? Those might be better indications of the general public’s level of interest.
Re: printing: I don’t recall any language that *forbids* negotiation of the ability for individual users to purchase a printed-on-demand copy of an electronic text. In fact, given UM’s recent purchase of an Espresso Book Machine, I would expect that we will push for our users to be able to purchase personal copies of books and have them delivered to the EBM for local printing. There could also be options for delivering a text to Lulu or other POD services.
3) The host libraries never *expected* to get profit sharing out of their deal with Google, IIRC. What I expect they *will* get is extremely favorable terms to access Google’s institutional product, so that their faculty and students can actually read all of the library’s in-copyright works online in full-text – which those libraries never expected to get either.
4) I’d bet that larger libraries with the wherewithal to do so will purchase access to Google’s institutional product, the same way that academic institutions will. I’d be pretty surprised if Ann Arbor District Library didn’t opt for a subscription, for example. But the public library in Trenton, MI (my home library growing up) probably can’t afford that access, and neither can hundreds or thousands of other small public libraries across the country. The Google settlement gives them access to *all* that digitized full-text material – even one terminal’s worth of access beats the hell out of no access at all.
Before we write this settlement off as “useless,” think about the pre-settlement situation: only snippets of text from in-copyright books are visible, even to the libraries who originally provided the books for scanning, unless the publishers choose to make a more extensive version available through Google’s Partner Program. The settlement may not be a perfect solution, but I think that making the perfect the enemy of the good here would be a big mistake.
October 31, 2008 @ 9:56 am
> Before we write this settlement off as “useless,”
> think about the pre-settlement situation:
> only snippets of text
you want us to accept a _bad_ “solution”
by comparing it to an even _worse_ one?
um, nice try, but no thank you.
it’s _our_ culture. as a library, it’s your job
to make it available to us, at no cost to us.
the same way we take a book from the shelf
and read it, we want to read that book online.
or offline.
do your job. or we’ll make you stand
at the end of the unemployment line
and we’ll be doing your job ourselves.
-bowerbird
October 31, 2008 @ 11:47 am
Unless the publishers provide digital copies, print on demand will probably not work all that well – the scans from libraries are not clean enough for printing, though they might be as good (or as bad!) as the old UMI dissertations.
@17 – The question of public domain works that would require some research to determine copyright status is an important one. But libraries shouldn’t (and probably don’t) have any interest in profit sharing. That’s not why they got into this, and it would be legally dodgy. They might want payment “in kind” – that is, access to the works without paying a subscription – but otherwise, their participation really is altruistic, unlike Google’s. They aren’t for profit entities.
And unless they envisioned this outcome – and willingly aided Google in becoming a near-monopoly as a book aggregator selling subscriptions to libraries – they’re also non-prophet.
November 1, 2008 @ 9:44 am
barbara said:
> they’re also non-prophet.
give barbara a star… :+)
-bowerbird
November 1, 2008 @ 11:53 pm
After actually studying the settlement so I’d know what I was talking about, some problems seem pretty apparent. Like, did anyone check out clause 6.3 (b)?
It revolves around what happens if Google accidentally charges somone for PD works, and the last sentence is pretty remarkable:
“”Google will have no right to reclaim public domain funds for a book that is in the public domain under the Copyright Act of the U.S. from a person who claimed he, she, or it is a Rights holder of such book once the Registry pays such funds to such person.”
What that means is that if a phony rightsholder get paid for a purchase, they get to keep the money. And at no time are consumers ever refunded their money if they are accidentally sold a PD book.
That sounds like a recipe for trouble, and lots of legal disputes and appeals from hopeful heirs. Google does have the responsibility to immediately provide a list of all their 1922-1964 PD books, but if there are as many as they say ( “most” ), doesn’t that also eliminate much of their business model? These two things together doesn’t give them much incentive to want to make books PD.
Here’s also something a little ominous– I might be wrong, but nowhere in the host library agreements is Google required to provide books for download– just full-view display. So what’s to stop them from charging for PD downloads some day?
The minute I saw the U.C agreement awhile back, it was pretty obvious what Google was up to with this whole scanning project– it was to license OOP but in-copyright books. The PD thing was just icing on the cake. As Siva and others have pointed out, these source materials are a big, mostly taxpayer -provided gift to Google. So, I think the settlement could be better: a download capability guaranteed, free remote access for everyone, not just institutions, and better public library services, without a per-page charge for printing.
November 2, 2008 @ 2:24 am
> if a phony rightsholder get paid for a
> purchase, they get to keep the money.
there’s no penalty for overclaiming rights?
that’s astonishing.
> And at no time are consumers ever
> refunded their money if they are
> accidentally sold a PD book.
equally astonishing.
and things even get worse, because
it looks like money that’s collected
for books that turn out to be “orphans”
will be absorbed into the registry or
parceled out to the authors/publishers.
> http://chaucer.umuc.edu/blogcip/collectanea/2008/11/google_book_search_and_orphan_1.html
> Here’s also something a little ominous–
> I might be wrong, but nowhere in the
> host library agreements is Google required
> to provide books for download–
> just full-view display. So what’s to stop them
> from charging for PD downloads some day?
there’s nothing to stop them.
as it is, they only provide _scans_ for download.
what we really want is the digital text — the o.c.r.
(what we _really_ want is _corrected_ o.c.r., but
we can assume some responsibility for that task.)
unlike the o.c.a., google doesn’t give digital text.
(you can scrape it, but that’s not what we want.)
i’ve been a big supporter of the google project
up to now, all across cyberspace. but this deal
has _badly_ soured my view of their intentions.
-bowerbird
November 2, 2008 @ 5:10 pm
Here’s a sentence I found in the official statement of UM, UC and other cooperating libaries that celebrates the Settlement. Notice what’s missing:
“–Enabling the sharing of public domain works among scholars, students and institutions. Not only will scholars and students at other universities be able to read these online, but this will make it possible to provide large numbers of texts to individuals wishing to perform research…”
Anybody catch it? There’s absolutely no mention of being able to download PD works, just reading them online. Why is that, and why no download stipulation in the settlement?
My prediction is reinforced by this omission: the days of free downloading of PD books will soon be over. When Google dumps the millions of 1922-1964 PD works into the ‘corpus,’ they aren’t going to want to give them away for free, and they don’t have to, either. It will be extremely cumbersome for them to do so, too-
No, Google is going to go to an all-online, ad supported “My Library” type model. This explains why they are voluntarily allowing the Internet Archive to now cache a huge number of downloaded PD books. They clearly want to get out of the download business, and would be more than happy to have the IA take on that trouble.
November 2, 2008 @ 5:25 pm
P.S.
“equally astonishing.
and things even get worse, because
it looks like money that’s collected
for books that turn out to be “orphans”
will be absorbed into the registry or
parceled out to the authors/publishers.”
It’s even worse than that– at least orphans are still in copyright, just to who, nobody knows. What 6.3 (b) does is give the registry money for reading fully PD works, if it’s thought they are still in copyright.
Talk about a lack of “incentivization’ ! Google– who also gets a cut of consumer purchases– will have no real motivation to adequately research the copyright status of post-1922 works. Why should they? There are no penalities for selling PD works!
Which is what– I am positive– they will start doing, at least for downloads. The free download days will soon be over.
November 2, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
Surprising that no one here foresees alternatives decoupled from the print model. Yes, this model promises to digitize existing books and so de(com)pose the library in a learning community. But the library’s new opportunity is to become publishers for local authors, publishing direct to others via Google, and recovering these badly needed revenues through L3C corporations, for example. As the role of librarian changes and book publishers’ rust-belt investments in printing presses weigh them down, peer review and editorial functions may re-focus themselves on libraries, academic, public, and for-profit. Consider the _Monitor_.
November 3, 2008 @ 3:17 pm
it’s _our_ culture. as a library, it’s your job
to make it available to us, at no cost to us.
In what sense are you using the word “our” in that sentence? It’s not “yours” in a legal sense – US copyright law is pretty clear that (generally speaking) the rights to the work belong to the author, who usually signs them over to the publisher as part of the contractual agreement of publication. (Note that I’m not *defending* that arrangement, I’m simply describing it.) Libraries purchase books for their collections, thus compensating the rights-holders, and make books available for browsing and (under certain conditions) for borrowing. The copyright doesn’t change hands in that process – it still resides with the publisher. (Until the work passes into the public domain, that is, but since you didn’t specify that you were only talking about PD works, I’ll assume you weren’t.)
Look, if you don’t like current US copyright law, that’s your prerogative – you’re certainly not alone. But suggesting that my fellow librarians and I are not doing our jobs because we won’t break the law and give you free books is downright insulting. Why not expend that energy working for copyright reform instead of sniping at librarians?
November 7, 2008 @ 11:15 am
my argument here is not about copyright.
(that’s another argument, somewhere else.)
but if i can check a physical book out of my
local library, and read it without “owning” it,
then i don’t see why i can’t get a digital copy,
on my computer, to read without “owning” it.
when i say “it’s _our_ culture”, i don’t mean
that we _own_ it, but rather that it has been
crammed down our throats by mass media
and the big corporations, for the most part,
meaning it has become a part of our lives…
and, since you didn’t seem to get it initially,
i will repeat that it is the job of _the_library_
– the entity that employs you — to deliver
that culture to people, without charging us.
(the entities that charge us are “bookstores”.)
hey, that’s why we _create_and_fund_ libraries.
so the least of us can be just as empowered by
information and knowledge as the richest of us.
bingo!
so you — the library — needs to make a stink
about the fact that google wants to charge us
for our culture. and if you don’t do that for us,
then pardon me for asking such an impertinent
question, but here it is: “what good are you?”
so, were you making a stink? no, you weren’t.
instead, you were trying to get us to _accept_
this tremendously awful “settlement”, saying:
> even one terminal’s worth of access
> beats the hell out of no access at all.
do you really consider that to be the alternative,
that we would have “no access at all”? i don’t…
and why you libraries ever signed contracts
agreeing to this public raping is beyond me.
also, i do not consider one terminal per library
to be an acceptable alternative either, so there.
but it looks like you do, because you said this:
> Before we write this settlement off as “useless,”
> think about the pre-settlement situation
that sure sounds like you want to laud this thing
as being better than an unacceptable “alternative”.
you want us to accept it as the least bad choice.
and then you even have the temerity to use that
old expression about “perfect” being the enemy
of “the good”, as if this settlement was _good_,
but we’d criticized it because it’s not _perfect_…
so let me say it loudly again: this “settlement” is
_not_ good. and it’s nowhere even in the general
neighborhood of being “perfect”. not even close.
this “settlement” is _awful_, because it puts the
hands of google and the author/publishers right
inside the wallets of the american people. (not to
mention that people in the rest of the world are
shit out of luck. we thought that a _cyberlibrary_
would be a global entity, and here you are again
raising the flags of nationalism. how backward!)
so stop doing cheerleading for this “settlement”.
it’s dog poop, and it needs to be treated as such.
the head librarian over at harvard got it right.
take a page out of his book.
because if the library cannot deliver our culture
to us, you will soon find that society will decide
it can cut your funding even deeper than it has…
you thought it was just an expression when i said
we’d put you at the end of the unemployment line,
didn’t you? you might want to think about it again.
-bowerbird
p.s. and if i was going to “snipe at a librarian”,
i’d go right to the top, the librarian of congress.
he should have started a mass scanning program
_decades_ ago, and i’ve been saying that all along.
i’ve also called for him to be fired for not doing it.
society is wasting _tons_ of money shepherding
physical books instead of managing digital bits…
and now, lordy, google and the author/publishers
want to charge us the same amount for those bits
as it has been charging us for ink-on-paper. agh!
November 7, 2008 @ 2:37 pm
bowerbird: What, exactly, is it that you *want* to see happen here? What would satisfy your notion of a “good” solution?
November 7, 2008 @ 3:46 pm
i’m not exactly sure what you mean by “here”, so
i will interpret the question to mean “cyberspace”.
and i’ll borrow a phrase coined by someone else
you might (or might not) respect more than me,
but i’ll make it a haiku for you (or at least 5-7-5):
“what i want is this:
universal access to
all human knowledge.”
i think (hope?) that we, as a society, have learned
this route benefits all of us best in the long run…
so, do we let a few selfish individuals short-circuit
this great good for their own personal outcomes?
i say no.
-bowerbird
November 7, 2008 @ 11:39 pm
Bowerbird: What I actually meant was “what would you prefer to see from the Google settlement?” Your answer here functions just as well, though, since it clearly shows that what you want cannot be achieved without radical fundamental change in the assignment of rights to those that produce knowledge. Despite your previous denial, this *is*, in fact, all about copyright. How would you propose that the authors who generate works continue to make a living if they don’t have the right to control the reproduction of their work? That’s what “copyright” means, in the literal sense of the term (don’t take my word for it – go check the OED). That right is *fundamentally* at odds with your desire for “universal access to all human knowledge.” (I’m reading “free of charge” into that description, which seems warranted based on your other postings.) If you can come up with a better solution that still works within the framework of copyright law, I’m willing to hear it. Until then, please stop insulting me and my profession by accusing us of selling out “your” culture.
November 8, 2008 @ 11:12 am
> What I actually meant was
> “what would you prefer to see
> from the Google settlement?”
i would’ve preferred that google had
never been sued in the first place…
and if they were, that society would
have been smart enough to smack
author/publishers upside the head,
telling ‘em to stop blocking progress,
because they will undoubtedly benefit
(more than enough, thank you much)
from what google is doing _for_ them.
or, barring all that, that the courts
would’ve done the right thing by us.
(but since they’re owned by the big
corporations, that was rather unlikely.)
but even if all that never came to pass,
i would propose what everyone always
thought all along — that google would
“pay for” the service of pushing these
books out to the public at zero cost
the exact same way that they “pay for”
all the _other_ services that they push
out to the public at zero cost to us,
which is by placing non-obtrusive ads
that happen to be contextually relevant.
so there’s your answer. that’s how funds
are raised to ensure that content providers
get paid. and there’s more than enough
money there; that’s why google is so rich.
so don’t act like it’s impossible or something.
it’s not. it’s extremely simple. and obvious.
furthermore, it will soon be widely recognized
– even to retards like the author/publishers –
that it is _suicide_ to try to control content…
it’s far smarter to get your content out there.
as far as you can. which means make it free.
that’s why even the huge “united features”
comics syndicate has recently decided to
make their entire database freely available.
> http://techdirt.com/articles/20081106/1825412763.shtml
they tried locking up their content so as to
“maximize revenue”, but they discovered that
lock-up and revenue-maximizing are simply
_incompatible_. the sad fact about this deal
between google and the author/publishers
is that the author/publishers are now shielded
from learning this real-world lesson, “protected”
by a false income-stream generated by google,
so that they will remain extremely comfortable
right up to the time when they become totally
irrelevant to the population. mark my words…
the bottom will fall out of their market with
the sickening rush of a vacuum being created.
just like the recent “financial crisis” popped up,
seemingly with “no warning”, except to those
observers who had seen it coming all along…
> what you want cannot be achieved
> without radical fundamental change
> in the assignment of rights to
> those that produce knowledge
oh please. stop being so stupid.
i just explained how it could work.
i could also agree to a payment for
content-producers depending upon
how much use the content received.
i just don’t want to saddle end-users
with the payment, since — as i said –
it benefits _all_ of us when we have
an educated citizenry. therefore, it is
– in my view — a good idea for society
(in the form of our _government_, i.e.,
the entity taxing us to provide services)
to accept responsibility for the payments,
just like it accepts the responsibility for
making the payments to create highways.
this is civics 101 stuff, not a big mystery.
otherwise, you’re left with a digital divide.
(you do know what that means, don’t you?
and you know why this “settlement” would
increase the size of the digital divide, right?
the rich get educated, and thus get richer,
and the poor are left to stew in their stew.)
and it’s worth noting — which is why i
already have noted it, here, previously
– that society already takes responsibility
for making the payments to buy books
to stock our hard-copy libraries so that
end-users can check out books _for_free_.
i’m just saying we need to do the equivalent
with digital resources to save ourselves money.
again, this is not rocket science. it’s obvious…
heck, i’m thinking that good authors would
make _more_ money than before, because
they’d get paid for _everyone_ who “borrowed”
their book, instead of just getting paid _once_
when the library _bought_ the book initially…
other than that wrinkle, all of this maps onto
our existing practice rather simply and clearly.
i’m just wondering why i have to explain this
to a librarian. you’re the one who should be
explaining it to me. and to google. and to
those author/publishers. so go do your job.
as for “insulting” you, i’d say that the low quality
of your argumentation is what is _really_ making
you look bad in the eyes of anyone reading this…
i might be pointing it out, but anyone else could
figure it out on their own, without help from me.
heck, i think dr. courant here is ahead of the pack,
by a long mile, just because he has the _courage_
to hold a public discussion. most other librarians
seem to be cowering in fear over the google “deal”,
acting like you must accept this terrible settlement.
the only one with any _vision_ is the harvard guy…
-bowerbird
November 8, 2008 @ 4:37 pm
[...] Bookstore. Even the UofM’s own Paul Courant said this settlement will create the “Universal Bookstore;” he didn’t say “Universal Library.” But I [...]
November 8, 2008 @ 5:33 pm
I have a few comments on this discussion, which I have enjoyed and learned from.
Much of the preceding discussion labors under the illusion that somehow Google has or might have had the rights necessary to make the scanned books publicly available. Of course, they don’t, and wouldn’t, and in the absence of this settlement or some other agreement with authors and publishers even a victory for Google in the lawsuit would not have enabled libraries to provide digital access to these works to any substantial audience, at any price, without clearing rights.
Bowerbird’s remark that this has nothing to do with copyright is just flat wrong. It has everything to do with copyright, and, because of public policy (bad policy in my view) libraries may not legally use digital scans of copyrighted works in the same way that they use print copies themselves. I wish it weren’t so, but it is.
The settlement provides broad access to the works in digital form; absent the settlement, our ability to make these works available would have been highly circumscribed. I am reasonably confident (although I could be wrong, and I don’t pretend otherwise) that the cost of licenses and of access to individual works will be low. My confidence does not suppose good will on the part of rightsholders or Google. Rather, it is based on my reading of supply and demand in the marketplace. (After all, most of the works in question have been out of print for a reason.) As the same time, the scholarly value of a license that enables access to essentially all of the collections of many great libraries is enormous, and NEVER could have been obtained absent some sort broad settlement.
And if someone comes up with several hundred million dollars I’d be delighted to participate in a scanning project covering all public domain work that would make the works available to anyone for any use, and I am confident that my enthusiasm would be widely shared in the library world.
November 9, 2008 @ 7:47 am
thank you for entering the conversation, and raising the bar.
> Much of the preceding discussion labors under the illusion
> that somehow Google has or might have had the rights
> necessary to make the scanned books publicly available.
i have never been under that illusion. i know the situation…
> Of course, they don’t, and wouldn’t, and in the absence of
> this settlement or some other agreement with authors and
> publishers even a victory for Google in the lawsuit would not
> have enabled libraries to provide digital access to these works
> to any substantial audience, at any price, without clearing rights.
there are 3 classes of works, and it’s best to keep that clear…
one of those classes is copyrighted works with known owners.
the other two classes are “orphan” works and public domain.
but let’s stay focused now on copyrights with known owners.
sooner or later, the author/publishers would’ve learned that
they need to make their works freely available themselves…
this agreement will short-circuit the learning of that lesson,
in the short-term. and in the long-term, author/publishers
will find that charging of any fees for their content will simply
make the vast majority of it _unnecessary_and_irrelevant_…
in cyberspace, if you can’t link to a thing, it becomes invisible.
a few high-profile books from the past will retain a visibility,
but the vast bulk of all the rest will simply shrink from view.
the reason for that is pretty clear…
more and more future books will be freely available online.
even the author/publishers who don’t really _want_ to put
their new books up for free will find that they simply must,
in order to get traction in a world awash with free books…
happily, they will discover this doesn’t mean they need to
give up hope of receiving remuneration. indeed, _many_
will discover — like paulo coelho — that putting books
online for free actually delivers them _increased_income_.
so we’ll have the curious weird situation where new books
are free, while older books are only available for purchase.
(or should i say “access via rental”?)
many of those older copyrighted books with known owners
were already out-of-print, because demand for ‘em was low.
even old books that are still in print return modest profits…
so, do we really think people will decide to _buy_ old books
in a market where they compete against _free_ new books?
i can’t see much reason why. so this “settlement” essentially
takes the author/publisher backlist out of effective circulation.
it’ll take a couple years for this to develop, but it _will_ happen.
if author/publishers wanna make their content irrelevant, fine.
it’s stupid, and it’s a shame, because we’re burying our culture.
but, you know, since the corporations seem to own our culture,
and we’re only allowed to experience it whenever they cram it
down our throats, i guess they have the “right” to bury it too…
but this “settlement” also affects the second class of books,
those who have owners that are unknown, a.k.a. “orphans”.
these poor babies are totally unloved. out of print, abandoned.
the promise of the google project — back in the glory days –
was that these books would soon be back in our lives again…
and the reason this “settlement” is so ugly is that it means that
these orphan works will essentially be buried again. that’s sad.
google doesn’t care. heck, the books might not get used much,
but every single time they are, google will hear a little ka-ching.
and the author/publishers don’t care. as far as they’re concerned,
orphans are competition, so the deeper they’re buried, the better.
(publishers would eliminate the public domain too, if they could.)
and, truth be told, the public probably doesn’t care much either.
since we don’t really know what’s in the orphans, we don’t know
exactly what we’re missing. but i suspect that this is a mistake…
as for the public domain, i don’t see anything in the agreement
that obligates google to make public-domain books available…
further, google now has a financial incentive to consider a book
to be an “orphan” _even_if_ there is no evidence that its copyright
was renewed, meaning it _should_ be considered “public domain”.
so even in this third class of books, the “settlement” is bad news.
> Bowerbird’s remark that this has nothing to do with copyright
> is just flat wrong. It has everything to do with copyright
from your standpoint, i understand that copyright ties your hands.
so you’re trying to figure out what to do now with your hands tied.
what _i_ am interested in doing here is getting your hands untied.
and — honestly — i don’t see why you’re not interested in that too.
> and, because of public policy (bad policy in my view)
> libraries may not legally use digital scans of copyrighted works
> in the same way that they use print copies themselves.
> I wish it weren’t so, but it is.
paul, paul, paul. it’s your job as the head of a major library –
the _only_ major library that stuck its neck out right at the start
and said “we are going to make these works available to people”
– to _work_hard_to_get_that_bad_public_policy_changed_…
i _know_ you can see the value of a cyberlibrary. i _know_ it.
unless you — and the rest of our library decision-makers — _act_,
and act now, the development of our cyberlibrary will be delayed
by decades, while we let author/publishers pursue this false route.
even in the world of compulsory licensing, there are better paths.
for instance, the compulsory licensing of music means that _any_
radio station can play a song. there was serious resistance to this,
when it was originally developed, but in the long run, the music biz
found that this model actually _helped_ their bottom line the most.
after a while, they didn’t just “not mind” that songs were being
played on the radio, they actually starting _paying_ the stations
to play them. (the recording companies soon realized this was
an “arms race” that didn’t benefit them, so they had it outlawed,
but the important thing is they’d realized the value of exposure.)
in the very same way, if the author/publishers were intelligent,
they’d realize that this same type of compulsory licensing would
help their bottom line the most. let anyone dish out your book,
get a little payoff for every page that is served, and be happy.
and the marketplace would decide which providers were “best”.
but now, google has a monopoly, with no incentive to innovate.
> The settlement provides broad access to the works in digital form;
“broad access” as long as you’re affiliated with a u.s. university,
or have enough money to be able to pay the per-book charges…
that’s a far cry from “universal access to knowledge”. a far cry.
> absent the settlement, our ability to make these works
> available would have been highly circumscribed.
perhaps, for a few years. until the author/publishers wised up.
by giving away the whole kit-and-caboodle right at the outset,
google is taking a path that will help google, but hurt the public.
i’m not surprised by this — even if their motto was “do no evil” –
but i _am_ surprised that librarians and the public are acquiescing.
(although i’m heartened that more people are speaking against it.)
> I am reasonably confident (although I could be wrong,
> and I don’t pretend otherwise) that the cost of licenses
> and of access to individual works will be low.
i do believe you’re wrong.
first of all, consider page 49 of the settlement agreement.
(that is, the page that has the number “49″ at the bottom.
it’s considered to be page _55_ by the adobe reader-app,
which shows how badly google and the author/publishers
can botch an e-book. and these guys are in charge? geez!)
anyway, you will find there google’s pricing methodology…
> Initial Pricing Bin Distribution. The initial distribution
> percentages of Settlement Controlled Price Books
> that Google offers for Consumer Purchase in the
> Pricing Bins will be:
> 5% ($1.99), 10% ($2.99), 13% ($3.99), 13% ($4.99), 10% ($5.99),
> 8% ($6.99), 6% ($7.99), 5% ($8.99), 11% ($9.99),
> 8% ($14.99), 6% ($19.99) and 5% ($29.99).
the first thing we have to point out is that the _marketplace_
has only begun to set the price for an electronic-books, with
little competition thus far. it’s a very long way from maturity.
yes, amazon is charging $9.99 for most books. more or less.
but the other e-book sites are selling most books for far less.
there’s even one “books for a buck” site. so pricing is in flux.
also remember that google is only “renting” us online “access”,
which — of course — is much less valuable than full ownership.
so _any_ rate structure is just a stab in the dark at this time…
but my goodness, can you believe those prices? i sure can’t…
the average price for e-book “access” in this schedule is $6.45.
and a full 11% of the books will be priced at $19.99 or $29.99!
the cheapest price is $1.99, and that’s only for 5% of the books.
and consider that this includes all the books from the past…
many of those books are, for want of a better word, garbage
– the kind of book you wouldn’t pay ten cents for hard copy.
so those, i guess, are the ones that’ll go in the low-price bins.
by the time we move up to any books that people might want,
we’re already up to the $4.99 or higher bins. for rental access!
as i said, the marketplace hasn’t gone through the process of
settling on a fair price for e-books, but this is clearly ridiculous.
consider this, from seth godin:
>> The market doesn’t care a whit about maintaining your industry.
>> The lesson from Napster and iTunes is that there’s even MORE
>> music than there was before. What got hurt was Tower and the
>> guys in the suits and the unlimited budgets for groupies and drugs.
>> The music will keep coming. Same thing is true with books.
>> So you can decide to hassle your readers (oh, I mean your customers)
>> and you can decide that a book on a Kindle SHOULD cost $15
>> because it replaces a $15 book, and if you do, we (the readers)
>> will just walk away. Or, you could say, “if books on the Kindle
>> were $1, perhaps we could create a vast audience of people
>> who buy books like candy, all the time, and read more and
>> don’t pirate stuff cause it’s convenient and cheap…”
>> I’m a pessimist that the book industry will learn from music.
>> How are you betting?
>> http://www.26thstory.com/blog/2008/11/1-we-have-a-fresh-slate-at-harperstudio-whats-your-advice—the-huge-opportunity-for-book-publishers-is-to-get-unstuck-yo.html
so seth here thinks that $1 books might produce more profit than
$15 books or $9.99 books. and i’m thinking that he might be right.
indeed, i can see developments where an entity would be able to
create a buyers coop of 100 million people who’d be willing to buy
download rights at _a_penny_per_book_. that’s right, one red cent.
before you laugh, do the math — it ends up being a million bucks.
i know a couple authors who would be willing to “settle” for that…
so let’s not be stupid and lock ourselves into deals with prices that
might hinder our ability to be creative in finding a path to the future.
> My confidence does not suppose good will
> on the part of rightsholders or Google. Rather,
> it is based on my reading of supply and demand
> in the marketplace.
“the marketplace” has already ditched the out-of-print books,
never mind the orphans who have been completely abandoned.
> (After all, most of the works in question have been
> out of print for a reason.)
right. no demand. so let’s charge money for them now.
let’s charge money for “access”, not even full ownership.
where is the logic there? i simply cannot see it.
at least i can’t see it until i realize that free/cheap books would
be _competition_ to the author/publishers. then it makes sense
that they’d want to do something to sabotage this competition.
the question now is whether or not we want to let ‘em do that…
> As the same time, the scholarly value of a license
> that enables access to essentially all of the collections
> of many great libraries is enormous, and NEVER could
> have been obtained absent some sort broad settlement.
there’s no question the “fully participating library partners”
are getting a sweet deal. _your_ use is virtually unlimited.
kinda like the health-insurance-plan that congress gives itself
is a pretty sweet deal for them, never mind what they give us.
but… do you really want to obtain a sweet deal for umichigan
at the expense of many other schools and the public at large?
because if you do, we will put you on the list of entities to fight.
look at my comments, throughout cyberspace, including this blog.
i’ve been a very strong google supporter up until this “settlement”.
but this is a _bad_ deal, for society and for our future. i’ll fight it.
it’s a mistake — a bad one — to let google have a monopoly here.
the corpus is far too important to let it reside within one company.
indeed, i believe the government should declare _eminent_domain_
and buy up this “property” — paying content-owners a fair price –
because research work on this corpus has mind-boggling potential.
so that’s another way out of this morass, paul — eminent domain…
it’s an established principle; we use it to build highways all the time.
this corpus, our printed legacy, is far more important than a road…
> And if someone comes up with several hundred million dollars
> I’d be delighted to participate in a scanning project covering
> all public domain work that would make the works available
> to anyone for any use, and I am confident that my enthusiasm
> would be widely shared in the library world.
i’m unclear here… how many public-domain books are out there?
5 million? at $15 each, o.c.a. could do that job for just $75 million.
considering wall street just nicked us for $600 _billion_, i’d say that
you just need to spread the meme that “education is too big to fail”.
i believe that. i’d guess obama believes that too. so, paul, do you?
you’re out in front of this parade. lead us where you want us to be.
don’t settle for some inferior destination, just because it’d be easy…
-bowerbird
November 10, 2008 @ 3:49 pm
Bowerbird: Just a couple of notes on specific points of your last reply
First, regarding in-copyright works, you ask:
“so, do we really think people will decide to _buy_ old books in a market where they compete against _free_ new books?”
Absolutely, and here’s why: they’re not in competition. Your assumption here seems to be that books are substitute goods for each other, in the economic sense – that one book will serve as well as another, and therefore that a cheaper good will always outcompete a more expensive good for which it is substitutable. This is clearly an unwarranted assumption for books, even on the consumer level: it takes only a moment’s reflection to see that Stephen King’s The Stand is generally not substitutable for the first Harry Potter novel, for example. It’s even more obviously true at the level of research works. If I’m writing a monograph on the role of Wealtheow in Beowulf, I can’t replace Michael Enright’s Lady with a Mead Cup with some other Beowulf study that happens to be free – it’s the unique content of the Enright volume that confers value.
Incidentally, Paulo Coelho seems to be using free books to make a profit by providing only limited access to his canon online. Judging from the download pages on his various websites (http://www.paulocoelho.com.br/engl/dow.shtml#ingles, http://paulocoelhoblog.com/free-texts/, http://paulocoelhoblog.com/internet-books/), he’s making only four full-length texts available, one of which (Warrior of the Light) appears to be a collection of Internet writings, which would have presumably already been free in their component parts. He’s also made *parts* of a few of his other works available for free online (most famously, the first 1/3 of The Witch of Portobello). The paradigm here seems to be that one makes money by offering free books if one gives away only part of the work, thereby allowing the user to make an informed judgement about the worth of the entire work as part of a purchase decision. This is, on the face of it, not substantively different from the clause in the Google settlement that makes 30% of any given work available without purchasing it.
Regarding pricing: if I read your quote of the Google price distribution correctly, 51% of the works initially offered for sale will be priced at $5.99 or less; 81% will be priced at $9.99 or less, the price that you quote as the Amazon price for “most books.” The important thing to remember when comparing Google’s pricing to Amazon’s is that Amazon is selling largely consumer-level works: novels, nonspecialist nonfiction, and technical works (programming guides, etc.). A large part of, for example, UM’s scanned collection is academic specialist nonfiction, for which prices in print are dramatically different. Amazon, for example, tells me that the latest monograph by Michael Enright (The Sutton Hoo Sceptre and the Roots of Celtic Kingship Theory) lists for $74.50 in hardcover, but can be purchased for $55.85. Google’s highest-priced bracket of $29.99 represents a 43.6% savings from the street price, and nearly 60% from the list price. His previous book, Lady with a Mead Cup, sells for $87.60, down from a $120 list price. Once a work goes out of print, its price can vary wildly depending on demand and the number of available copies: it could plummet to virtually nothing, or rise to several times its initial offering price. (Before Lady with a Mead Cup came back into print, used copies were selling for prices up to a thousand dollars.) Scholars who can’t afford these prices, and don’t have access to a library of UM’s caliber, could request the book from a better-equipped library by ILL – and then wait, possibly for several weeks, to get access for a scant few weeks before being required to send it back. (Assuming that they get it at all – many academic libraries won’t send books by ILL to public libraries, for example.) Or they could purchase a digital copy from Google and have instant access to a copy that takes up no bookshelf or luggage space, and which can be searched in full-text just like a Word document.
With respect to those out-of-print books, then, the problem is not that there’s “no demand” for them; it’s that demand is insufficient to justify the cost of another print run of 500 or 1000 copies. In many cases, however, the demand is still high enough to drive up the price of the few remaining print copies several-fold from their original price. If that’s the case, then it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Google might sell fifty or so digital copies of a given title at $30 each.
I also think that Seth Godin misses the mark in comparing the book industry to the music industry. First, suggesting a $1 book download price based on the iTunes model is specious – the proper comparison from a length-of-work and artist-investment standpoint is an album download, which generally costs $9.99, about what you’ll pay for a new-release CD at any big-box store these days. Second, the music industry’s willingness to price legal downloads at that price point was in large part a reaction to the ease of music piracy, a factor that simply is not in play with books. Finally, Seth’s suggestion that there could be a vast market for $1 Kindle downloads overlooks the high price of the reader itself – which, unlike the iPod and other digital music players, doesn’t work with your current collection of older-generation technology (print books), creating a substantial barrier to entry for many of the avid readers who’d presumably form the most devoted core of any substantial ebook market.
And while we’re looking at Seth’s blog post, let’s close with the comment from Emma Darwin further down the page, which I think bears on this discussion:
November 11, 2008 @ 1:55 pm
Accord de l’Association des éditeurs américains (AAP) avec Google…
Le litige entre Google et les éditeurs américains à propos du programme Google Book Search est en voie de réglement, avec la publication d’un compromis autorisant Google à poursuivre ses opérations de numérisation, d’indexation et de…
November 12, 2008 @ 3:35 am
um, you’ve accused me (falsely) of
insulting you and your profession,
but now you want to continue with
the conversation. what’s with you?
do you like to be “insulted”? or what?
first apologize for your accusation,
if you want me to speak with you…
-bowerbird
November 25, 2008 @ 2:28 pm
[...] defensa similar expone Paul Courant, University Librarian y Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan y firme aliado de Google, [...]
December 17, 2008 @ 3:42 am
These blog entries are great. How about an update?
January 5, 2009 @ 5:20 pm
The process of notifying authors and publishers about the Google Book settlement has begun. If you would like to review the court-approved Notice, which summarizes the settlement, important terms, claims process, and key dates, it is available at http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/notice.html.
Rightsholders may now claim their works at http://www.googlebooksettlement.com.
January 28, 2009 @ 3:23 pm
Is nice to have the option to have the books available online.
February 2, 2009 @ 5:47 pm
yeah, online and not restringed only to the nearby bookstores and libraries, good idea
February 2, 2009 @ 8:37 pm
[...] On pourrait évoquer divers problèmes autour de cet accord. Et tout d’abord, le monopole exorbitant donné ainsi à Google pour jouer les interfaces entre les maisons d’édition, les sites marchands et l’ensemble des usagers du Net. Ou bien le fait que l’accord concerne tous les détenteurs de copyright, y compris ceux qui ne peuvent pas être identifiés (les œuvres dites “orphelines”), au risque d’empêcher désormais les sites comme ManyBooks, Project Gutenberg ou l’ABU de proposer ces œuvres en téléchargement gratuit. Ou encore la mutation de Google Books Search, de bibliothèque universelle, en une librairie universelle. [...]
April 28, 2009 @ 5:20 am
Wait………. if the Google Book Search construct allows one to scrounge and not own resources, isn’t it more similar to a ‘library’ than a ‘bookstore’? Descriptions can be troubles in the means that they suggest many facets, a number of which tell and some confuse.
October 8, 2010 @ 7:33 am
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August 17, 2012 @ 6:05 am
For the past few years I’ve wondered why the general public was excluded from viewing scanned books owned by state-funded universities. (I’ve been forced to buy more than a few of those crappy-bound reprints with the University of Michigan logo on them for my personal research). I finally realized that universities are merely corporations, and elitism is their business model. Thanks Paul.
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