[Ecommerce] Re: [A2k] Toobin on Google strategy

Tue Feb 13 08:50:03 2007

Manon and all,

  Good strategy for Google maybe, but a bad strategy for healthy
Ecommerce in this space.  I personally would disagree such a
strategy is all that good for Google stock holders or users, and
even future customers as it has a cost increase associated with
doing so.

Manon Ress wrote:

> --
> [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
> Interesting story in the New Yorker regarding Google "strategy" of
> scan, get sued,  and settle....
>
> Quote:
> Google=92s advantage may well be cemented if the company settles its
> lawsuits with the publishers and authors. =93If Google says to the
> publishers, =91We=92ll pay,=92 that means that everyone else who wants to
> get into this business will have to say, =91We=92ll pay,=92 =94 Lessig sa=
id.
> =93The publishers will get more than the law entitles them to, because
> Google needs to get this case behind it. And the settlement will
> create a huge barrier for any new entrants in this field.=94
> End of quote
>
> http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070205fa_fact_toobin
>
> GOOGLE=92S MOON SHOT
> by JEFFREY TOOBIN
> The quest for the universal library.
> Issue of 2007-02-05
> Posted 2007-01-29
>
> Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the
> campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand
> books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page
> by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The
> company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other
> leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the
> New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google=92s
> original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books
> are processed each week on the company=92s custom-made scanning equipment=
.
>
> Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the
> full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched
> on the company=92s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up
> and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you
> can enter a word or phrase=97say, Ahab and whale=97and the search returns
> a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight
> hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville=92s
> novel. Clicking on =93Moby-Dick, or The Whale=94 calls up Chapter 28, in
> which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search
> for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it with other
> editions. Google won=92t say how many books are in its database, but
> the site=92s value as a research tool is apparent; on it you can find a
> history of Urdu newspapers, an 1892 edition of Jane Austen=92s letters,
> several guides to writing haiku, and a Harvard alumni directory from
> 1919.
>
> No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed
> in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a
> database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries
> around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. =93We think
> that we can do it all inside of ten years,=94 Marissa Mayer, a vice-
> president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said
> recently, at the company=92s headquarters, in Mountain View,
> California. =93It=92s mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of
> Google Books as our moon shot.=94
>
> Google=92s is not the only book-scanning venture. Amazon has digitized
> hundreds of thousands of the books it sells, and allows users to
> search the texts; Carnegie Mellon is hosting a project called the
> Universal Library, which so far has scanned nearly a million and a
> half books; the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that includes
> Microsoft, Yahoo, and several major libraries, is also scanning
> thousands of books; and there are many smaller projects in various
> stages of development. Still, only Google has embarked on a project
> of a scale commensurate with its corporate philosophy: =93to organize
> the world=92s information and make it universally accessible and useful.=
=94
>
> In part because of that ambition, Google=92s endeavor is encountering
> opposition. A federal court in New York is considering two challenges
> to the project, one brought by several writers and the Authors Guild,
> the other by a group of publishers, who are also, curiously, partners
> in Google Book Search. Both sets of plaintiffs claim that the library
> component of the project violates copyright law. Like most federal
> lawsuits, these cases appear likely to be settled before they go to
> trial, and the terms of any such deal will shape the future of
> digital books. Google, in an effort to put the lawsuits behind it,
> may agree to pay the plaintiffs more than a court would require; but,
> by doing so, the company would discourage potential competitors. To
> put it another way, being taken to court and charged with copyright
> infringement on a large scale might be the best thing that ever
> happens to Google=92s foray into the printed word.
>
> Though Google has more than ten thousand employees=97about fifty new
> ones are hired each week=97and a market capitalization of more than a
> hundred and fifty billion dollars, the company cultivates the air of
> a college campus at its headquarters, in Silicon Valley. Now and
> then, there are self-consciously wacky stunts, like Pajama Day, which
> happened to take place when I visited. (The event was to be madcap
> within reason; supervisors were told to convey the message that
> =93pajamas means =91pajamas,=92 not =91what you sleep in.=92 =94) When I =
met with
> Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, he was wearing bright-blue
> p.j.s, with the company=92s logo stitched on the breast pocket.
>
> The story of how Brin and Google=92s other co-founder, Larry Page, met
> as graduate students in computer science at Stanford in the mid-
> nineties, and devised a series of elegant software algorithms that
> allowed Web searchers to find relevant information quickly and
> efficiently, has become part of Silicon Valley lore. Less well known
> is that, at the time, Brin and Page were also working on Stanford=92s
> Digital Library Technologies Project, an attempt, funded by the
> federal government, to organize different kinds of stored
> information, including books, articles, and journals, in digital
> form. =93There was an attitude in computer science that putting things
> on dead trees was obsolete and getting it all into a searchable,
> digital format was a quest that had to be accomplished someday,=94
> Terry Winograd, a Stanford professor who was a mentor to Page and
> Brin, said.
>
> After founding Google, in 1998, Page and Brin=97who are now in their
> mid-thirties and worth around fourteen billion dollars each=97began to
> talk about how to include books in the company=92s database. Page, in
> particular, embraced the idea of putting books online; at one point,
> he set up a primitive lab in his office, with a scanner and a page-
> turning machine. =93I think it was motivating to have those kinds of
> aspirations, but nobody really took it seriously,=94 Brin told me. The
> men were less interested in making it easy for people to obtain the
> full texts of books online than in making accessible the information
> those books contained. =93We really care about the comprehensiveness of
> a search,=94 Brin said. =93And comprehensiveness isn=92t just about, you
> know, total number of words or bytes, or whatnot. But it=92s about
> having the really high-quality information. You have thousands of
> years of human knowledge, and probably the highest-quality knowledge
> is captured in books. So not having that=97it=92s just too big an
> omission.=94 As Marissa Mayer put it, =93Google has become known for
> providing access to all of the world=92s knowledge, and if we provide
> access to books we are going to get much higher-quality and much more
> reliable information. We are moving up the food chain.=94
>
> In 2002, Google quietly made overtures to several libraries at major
> universities. The company proposed to digitize the entire collection
> free of charge, and give the library an electronic copy of each of
> its books. =93Larry is an undergrad alum here at Michigan, and he knew
> we were already interested in digitizing the library as part of our
> preservation efforts,=94 John Wilkin, an associate university librarian
> at Michigan, told me. =93There was a lot of back-and-forth between
> Google and us in the process. We wanted to insure that the materials
> wouldn=92t be damaged and that what came out could be used as a
> preservation surrogate. They started experimenting with different
> ways of copying the images, and we started a pilot project in July,
> 2004. We=92ve been getting better, going faster. We=92re doubling our
> output all the time.=94 The Michigan library holds seven million
> volumes, and Wilkin believes that Google will have copied the entire
> collection in about six years.
>
> Last month, at the New York Public Library, Google hosted a
> conference on the future of the publishing industry. About four
> hundred people=97mainly publishing executives and agents=97attended, most
> of them grimly aware of the simultaneous lethargy and panic that have
> characterized their industry=92s response to the digital age. Nearly
> all attempts to sell books in an electronic format have been
> disappointing, and now Google appeared to be encroaching on the
> publishers=92 domain. The implicit message of the conference was summed
> up by a quotation from Charles Darwin that was projected on a screen:
> =93It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
> intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.=94 As Laurence
> Kirschbaum, a longtime publishing executive who recently became a
> literary agent, told me at the conference, =93Google is now the
> gatekeeper. They are reaching an audience that we as publishers and
> authors are not reaching. It makes perfect sense to use the
> specificity of a search engine as a tool for selling books.=94
>
> Google thought so, too, and designed the books project accordingly.
> In addition to forming partnerships with libraries, the company has
> signed contracts with nearly every major American publisher. When one
> of these publishers=92 books is called up in response to search
> queries, Google displays a portion of the total work and shows links
> to the publisher=92s Web site and online shops like Amazon, where users
> can buy the book. =93We are helping the publishers reach consumers that
> otherwise might not have known about their books and helping them
> market their books by giving limited but relevant previews of the
> books,=94 Jim Gerber, Google=92s director of content partnerships, told
> me. =93The Internet and search are custom made for marketing books.
> When there are a hundred and seventy-five thousand new books each
> year, you can=92t market each one of those books in mass market. When
> someone goes into a search engine to learn more about a topic, that
> is a perfect time to make them aware that a given book exists.
> Publishers know that =91browse leads to buy.=92 =94 (Google says that it
> does not take a cut of sales made through its books site.)
>
> Still, on October 19, 2005, several leading publishers, including
> Simon & Schuster, the Penguin Group, and McGraw Hill=97all of which are
> partners in Google Book Search=97filed a lawsuit against the company,
> seeking to stop the project. The publishers don=92t object to Google=92s
> plan for helping them sell new books, but they assert that the
> library component of the project is illegal. They claim that Google=92s
> =93massive, wholesale and systematic copying of entire books still
> protected by copyright=94 infringes on the publishers=92 rights. They
> demand that Google stop further copying and =93destroy all unauthorized
> copies made by Google through the Google Library Project of any
> copyrighted works.=94 (The Authors Guild filed its lawsuit around the
> same time.) The publishers, who have the support of the Association
> of American Publishers, are suffering from a version of the problem
> that John Kerry had in the last Presidential campaign: they are for
> Google Book Search at the same time that they are against it.
>
> Copyright law dates to the birth of the Republic. Article I of the
> Constitution assigns Congress the right to pass laws =93securing for
> limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
> respective Writings and Discoveries.=94 The first copyright law was
> passed in 1790, and it has been frequently and confusingly amended
> over the years, most recently in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term
> Extension Act of 1998, which extended copyright terms by twenty
> years. (The law is also known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act,
> because the Walt Disney Company, seeking to protect its copyright on
> early animated classics like =93Steamboat Willie,=94 lobbied heavily for
> it.) The twisted history of copyright law has insured an awkward
> passage into the digital age.
>
> snippage
>
> ************************************************************************
> ***
> Manon Anne Ress
> manon.ress@keionline.org,
> www.cptech.org
>
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--
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