[Upd-discuss] Books Online: The Fee versus Free Battle Begins, by Barbara Quint, Information Today, 21.12.2005

[Zapopan Martin Muela-Meza]

Books Online: The Fee versus Free Battle Begins
Information Today
by Barbara Quint
November 21, 2005
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb051121-2.shtml

Now that all the busy book digitizers have done enough to create what
anyone would call library-size collections, they have begun to deliver the
full text electronically and to reveal how they plan to “monetize” their
investments. Instead of just using its Search Inside the Book postings to
encourage online purchases, Amazon.com will soon deliver “any page,
section, or chapter of a book, as well as the book in its entirety” to
consumers under two payment plans. Random House plans to offer its books
digitally at a price. In the “keep it free, or at least free to the user”
camp, Google, which has just changed the name of Google Print to Google
Book Search (http://books.google.com), has opened its vaults and started
delivering public domain books in full, as well as the “snippets” of
copyrighted books connected to book purchasing outlets or library
collections. Microsoft, which announced a commitment to digitizing 150,000
books as part of its MSN Book Search commitment to the Open Content
Alliance (OCA), has named The British Library (BL) as the source of the
first 100,000 books. Information professionals seeing this explosion of
book content are already evaluating the impact of the new content and the
opportunity to integrate and enrich their existing services.

“Show Me the Money”

In 2001, Amazon began digitizing books for its “Look Inside the Book”
program, which evolved into “Search Inside the Book” in 2003. Both
programs allowed users to identify books they might want to purchase in
print. According to Amazon, from its initial 120,000 books, the program
has evolved until half the books Amazon sold in the U.S. last year have
full-text versions with Amazon’s Search Inside program. This year, the
company expanded the service to its subsidiaries in the U.K., Germany,
France, Canada, and Japan.

Sometime in 2006, Amazon will launch full online access to books from its
digitized collection under two pricing plans. Amazon Pages will allow
purchase of online access to all or portions of books; Amazon Upgrade will
allow customers who buy a print book to add online access for a set fee.
Currently, Amazon cannot identify how many of the hundreds of thousands of
books in its program will be available for online reading. The company is
busy making arrangements with copyright holders, particularly publishers.

According to Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, the goal is to
“make the world’s books instantly accessible anytime and anywhere.” John
Sargent, CEO of Holtzbrinck Publishers, a participant in the program,
stated: “It is important for the publishing community to explore new
business models for digital delivery that compensate publishers and
authors fairly.”

Amazon itself became a publisher of sorts earlier this year when it
launched Amazon Shorts (http://www.amazon.com/shorts), a collection of
digital-only, short-form literature (short stories, one-act plays,
personal memoirs, alternate chapters and scenes to established stories,
etc.), each priced at 49 cents. At its launch, nearly 60 established
authors participated in Amazon Shorts.

Under the new payment programs, Amazon will place text into account
holders’ Digital Lockers. The Amazon Shorts program already uses the
Digital Lockers, as do other Amazon services, e.g., streaming media feeds
of tunes or video from pre-ordered digital entertainment. So far, the
terms and conditions for publisher-approved access to books have yet to be
decided, according to the Amazon representative. She expected the terms
and conditions to vary from publisher to publisher and even from title to
title. However, she also stated that the Digital Lockers do offer
“perpetual access” to registered Amazon account holders.

The price for access must also be arranged with publishers or copyright
holders. At this point, the company estimates that a typical price for
Amazon Upgrade access to a $20 book might run about $2. The price of
Amazon Pages will be set by the copyright holder, just as with a print
book, according to the representative. The company does not plan on
introducing ads into the paid-view content, but the Amazon representative
did state: “Never say never.” As of now, Amazon does not have any plans to
institute institutional access, e.g., to textbooks for a classroom of
distance learning students or to librarians licensing content, but the
representative expects the company to respond to all kinds of feedback
from customers after the new paid access programs launch.

One other point emerged in discussion. Experts estimate that 80 percent of
books in copyright fall into the “orphan” category (i.e., in-copyright but
out of print). Since many standard publisher/author contracts include a
clause that lets the right to publish revert to authors if the publisher
lets the book drop out of print, I asked the Amazon representative whether
authors holding copyright could join the Search Inside the Book program
and have Amazon digitize their publications. She indicated that the
company would work with any copyright holder. Authors entering such a
program would then, it would seem, no longer have to share any royalty
payments with publishers. On the other hand, once a publisher adds a book
to the Amazon—or any other—digitization program, they argue that the book
has become permanently “in print.”

Another micropayment program for online access to books was announced by
Random House, a leading popular and trade book publisher. The company
plans to use online booksellers, search engines, entertainment portals,
and other appropriate vendors as outlets for online viewing of its content
on a pay-per-page-view basis. In time, according to Richard Sarnoff,
president of Random House, Inc.’s corporate development group, the company
could eventually decide to host the service and serve pages in-house, for
technical expedience. Sarnoff stated: “We believe that it is important for
publishers to be innovative in providing digital options for consumers to
access our content, especially in light of the emergence of ubiquitous
Internet access and improved display technologies that can support
sustained reading.”

Agreements with vendors may differ, but the key components for Random
House will have books available for full indexing, search, and display but
will not allow downloading, printing, or copying. No more than 5 percent
of a book’s content will appear in “free sample” page views. Vendors will
pay Random House 4 cents per page displayed beyond the free sample and
mark up the content to consumers. Random House indicated that 99 cents for
20 pages “could represent an attractive introductory consumer offer.” The
company expected pricing to vary depending upon the type of content (e.g.,
25 cents for a recipe page from a cookbook or at a discount for multiple
pages). As long as vendors provide title-by-title reporting to Random
House, the publisher will allow institutional or enterprise pricing as
well as micropayments by individual customers. Vendors must have
encryption and security measures to ensure protection of digital content.
Random House will allow authors to “opt out” of the program.

Standard publisher/author contracts with Random House offer a higher
royalty rate for digital delivery than for print (50 percent as opposed to
15 percent or less). The publisher has indicated that it plans to split
the payments from the new page charge system with authors. Authors Guild
executives have begun reminding authors to pay more attention to the
clauses in their contracts covering digital delivery.
“Free to Me” or Other People’s Money

Google continues—for now—to maintain its allegiance to business models
that do not charge users directly, stating that the company is “exploring
new access models to help authors and publishers sell more books online
but [it doesn’t] have anything to announce.” At the same time, it saluted
the Amazon announcement: “Amazon is a valuable partner and we link to
Amazon so people can buy books they’ve found. We’re glad our users will
have additional ways to access the books they’ve found.”

Google also commented on the Random House announcement as another
illustration of the value of such services in enabling users to discover
and purchase books in new ways. A Nov. 14 article in The Wall Street
Journal by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Kevin J. Delaney (“Google Checks
Out Interest in Online Book ‘Rental’ Plan”) indicated that the company has
begun initial discussions with book publishers on letting readers “rent”
online copies of new books for a short period of time at possibly 10
percent of the book’s list price.

Last week, Google changed the name of its book program from Google Print
to Google Book Search. Apparently some users were confused by the name and
thought it meant that Google would help them print out user documents or
Web pages visited. In announcing the service on its blog, company
representatives admitted, with something of a virtual sigh: “No, we don’t
think that this new name will change what some folks think about this
program. But we do believe it will help a lot of people understand better
what we’re doing. We want to make all the world’s books discoverable and
searchable online, and we hope this new name will help keep everyone
focused on that important goal.”

Responding to an inquiry on the similarity of the new name with
Microsoft’s MSN Book Search, a Google representative assured me that they
were not imitating Microsoft. “Rather, we’ve re-branded to make it easier
for users to understand what the service will do for them. This is
important as the index now has many many more books and is becoming more
of a consumer destination then when we first started.”

Google has now opened up its book collection and begun to deliver full
text of the public domain books digitized from its Google Library project.
The http://books.google.com site restricts searches to the book results in
the Google index, but the same content will also appear in Google.com Web
search results. Anyone can search and browse every page and save
individual page images of the public domain works, but searching
in-copyright material will produce only a bibliographic description and
“snippets” of keyword-in-context excerpts.

Though most of the public domain material comprises older works that have
“fallen out” of copyright, uncopyrighted government documents should be
more current. Search parameters include date operators, phrase searching,
etc. (For more information, go to the FAQs for Google Book Search,
http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/help.html.) Once located, one
can use a “Search within this book” feature, order the book using the “Buy
this Book” link, or—for books scanned from libraries—click on the library
link to find a local library using the Open WorldCat connection. Books
scanned from publisher contributions do not link through OCLC to local
libraries on a Google Book Search page. To find such links, users must
return to the main Google page, or possibly Google Scholar, and enter the
book information again to “Find in a Library.”

Users may not have to pay, but they’re encouraged to help. A link at the
bottom of each Google Book Search page asks, “See a problem with this
page?” If so, you are encouraged to fill out a form. The FAQs also
encourage users to inform Google if they find a book treated as public
domain when it shouldn’t be or as in-copyright when it isn’t.

After that, Google hopes the people will find new and creative ways to use
the public domain content (“Your imagination is the limit!”), though it
wants those working with Google Book Search content to maintain
attribution to Google. Chuck Hamaker, associate university librarian for
collections and technical services at the University of North Carolina,
Charlotte’s Atkins Library, is already investigating the feasibility of
adding Google Book Search links to his online catalog, bibliographic
instructions, curriculum support material, etc.

In late October, Microsoft announced it was joining the OCA and beginning
its own book digitization program called MSN Book Search. (See the
NewsBreak “Microsoft Launches Book Digitization Project—MSN Book Search”
at http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb051031-2.shtml.) Since then, it
announced that the BL (http://www.bl.uk) would provide the books for the
initial phase of the digitization project. The Internet Archive, OCA
administrator and digitizer, will set up on-site digitization in 2006.
Initial figures estimate the digitization project as 25 million pages of
content. The 100,000 book commitment should cost between $2.5 million and
$3 million for the first year (and this is only a start) More books could
be added to the project. The project represents an element in the BL’s
development of the National Digital Library infrastructure.

Microsoft plans to digitize only out-of-copyright books. According to BL’s
Lawrence Christensen, BL has decided to restrict digitization to 19th
century or earlier, but not necessarily all of that. According to
Christensen, one of the advantages of dealing with the BL is taking
advantage of its curators’ knowledge of the more abstruse aspects of
British copyright law. Apparently it haa already marked one book published
in the 1850s as inadmissible to the program; it is still under copyright.
In response to my inquiry, Christensen could not say who was still cashing
the royalty checks. The BL already has commercial partners assisting it in
digitizing material and has had an ongoing relationship with Microsoft in
developing its Digital Object Management (DOM) digitization framework for
archiving material “born digital.”

Christensen said that, though not a member of the OCA at this time, the BL
certainly shares its goals and anticipates entrance into the program with
parallel efforts. The BL supplies the model OCA uses for displaying books
in its Turning the Pages display
(http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html), done in partnership
with Armadillo Systems.

For those of little faith when it comes to Microsoft’s long-term
commitment to open access (OA), the company’s strategy for revenue
generation may be in a general process of change. On Oct. 30, Ray Ozzie,
Microsoft’s CTO, circulated a memo with a cover letter from chairman Bill
Gates, that advocated adjusting revenue generation to the Internet Age.
Gates stated, “The next sea change is upon us” and Ozzie advised, “In some
cases, it may be possible for one to obtain more (software) revenue
through the advertising model than through a traditional licensing model.”

Someone always has to pay the tab, but when it’s O.P.M (Other People’s
Money), it feels free to the users.
Barbara Quint is contributing editor for NewsBreaks, editor-in-chief of
Searcher, and a columnist for Information Today. Her e-mail address is bquint@mindspring.com.

Zapopan Muela
----------------------------- v -------------------------------
"Tiranos y autócratas han entendido siempre que el alfabetismo, 
el conocimiento, los libros y los periódicos son un peligro 
en potencia. Pueden inculcar ideas independientes e incluso
de rebeldía en las cabezas de sus súbditos.
----------------------------- v -------------------------------
"Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, 
learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. 
They can put independent and even rebelious ideas to the heads 
of their subjects."
----------------------------- v -------------------------------
-- Sagan, Carl (1997). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle
in the Dark : El mundo y sus demonios: La ciencia como una luz en la 
oscuridad. México: Planeta, p. 390; New York: Ballantine Books, p. 362.


		
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