Rightsholders may now claim their works at http://www.googlebooksettlement.com.

first apologize for your accusation,
if you want me to speak with you…

-bowerbird

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…

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:

Maybe I’m being a dinosaur, but I don’t see that this model for the future is very different for the author from the present. As it is at the moment, only 10% of writers can make a living writing nothing but what they want to write - the rest of us already make up the difference with ‘bespoke’ writing , or teaching, or editing, or working in a shop. The only difference in this model is that we will no longer be paid at all for the work which is the creative lifeblood of the arts in the future.

> 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