That’s when Google releases Google Books. The recent Google Book Search Copyright Settlement note has some strong clues (read the 39 page notice). Edit: The settlement still has to be approved by the court.
First, I’m going to include some key provisions of the Google Book Search Copyright Settlement –
- Copyright holders get 63% of the revenues earned from Google’s sale of subscriptions to an electronic books database, sale of online access to books, advertising revenues, and other commercial uses.
- There is a time constrained opt-out for copyright holders of out of print books - Removal requests must be received by April 5, 2011.
- For In-Print Books, in order for Google to make Display Uses of any in-print Book, both the author (other than a work-for-hire author) and the publisher must agree to authorize Google to make Display Uses.
- Google will sell individual book access to users (future possibilities include PDF book downloads).
- It will also sell subscriptions to institutions which, if I understand correctly, will include all books in the google books database.
- A 3rd party independent entity will divvy up profits between rightsholders.
- There’s a Google Partner Program different from the 3rd party independent entity which some rights owners can choose to join. This is not fleshed out well.
- I can’t understand correctly – it seems like authors/publishers share earnings for out of print books.
This is going to be a real struggle – for Google, for Amazon, and for publishers and authors. Here are my thoughts –
- Amazon stole a lead over other booksellers by having the largest range of available books - in a sense the long tail of books. However, Google is trying to do the exact same thing to them, by extending to out of print books, and going to a longer tail of books – the question is – is this profitable?
- Its interesting that Google will take out of print books and sell them to users (and to institutions as part of their cover-all subscriptions) and benefit from it. How many out of print books are there that 100-1000 people want to buy? Google just has to pay the price of scanning the book once, and then can benefit from it forever.
- Amazon needs to do something like this itself. For out of print books, it needs to identify the subset of all out of print books that have actual demand. For in print books, it needs to enable Kindle Edition books to be read outside of the Kindle.
- Google is going to start opening up a lot of wars on a lot of fronts. From a pure business strategy perspective, how many huge wars do they want to get into?
- I think every single profitable online business that depends on traffic from google should realize that sooner or later Google will try to figure out if there’s enough profit in there, and will come after them. Google has a lot of power because it’s the #1 search engine. It can, and is, using this position of power to dive into more and more lucrative businesses (it hasn’t had any success so far – however it’s very probable it will).
- If I get this correctly, this settlement is just valid for Google. Any other business trying something like this would have to come up with a similar agreement with the rightsholders.
- Google is moving from organizing the world’s information to selling it. Google obviously thinks there are a few different opportunities here – selling subscriptions to libraries, selling book access and downloads to people, displaying ads against book pages, and also a lot of people who are looking for out of print books. It almost seems too big of a task.
- Google is very adamant on referring to non display uses. There is obviously some big use of books separate from actually displaying books to users that it thinks has a lot of revenue opportunity. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is cooking up something completely out of left field.
- Steve Jobs might think books are dead – Google certainly doesn’t. In fact, given the amount of effort they’re putting into it, I think Google sees a huge revenue stream. Fundamentally what does Google actually make money off of – by taking people to good quality content. What is the biggest set of proven quality content that is untapped? That Google is not yet making money off of? It’s books.
Filed under: kindle Tagged: | amazon vs google, google book search
Personally, I hope all succeeds well with Google.
Google is probably doing one of the best things that we could ever possibly do for books, much better than Amazon could ever possibly do. Now, what would be even better is if Amazon partnered with Google enough that we can use the Google book formats on the Kindle — but, considering that we have difficulties doing this with Amazon’s own digital editions and Mobipocket, I don’t see this kind of compatibility coming any time soon.
Will this be profitable? The real answer is, who cares? As I said, this is the best thing to happen to books since eBooks started. Nobody really will be hurt out of any of this. If any OOP books makes one sale, I’m sure that’s the first dime that the book has made in years.
As long as court fees don’t continue, this will be a largely no-cost venture. The two major areas where they will even need to put money in:
* Server costs — something they already have. Need extra hard drive space for all the added virtual shelf space that will be required? The price is a small drop in the bucket, especially with constantly lowering prices of hard drives.
* Digitizers — which can theoretically come from many places. They can pay their own people, they can accept through volunteers (which might be the only way for many rare books), or the publishers/authors can supply. Basically, low cost again if they can rely on the volunteer and direct-from-publisher base. They already rely on volunteers for many of the free books that are up currently, just as Project Gutenberg does.
Here’s the thing: Google is all about the spreading of information to the masses. Google is a big supporter of the free culture and the open source.
I have a lot of respect for Google and the things that it does. It still boggles the mind how a website with nothing but a logo, a text box, and a couple of buttons can even get to where it has come today. I may not be getting a Google phone and such, but their innovations have truly become the path of where we should be going. As they said in their Google Chrome comic book, they hope that they can at least build a model for their competitors to follow.
Google definitely knows what they’re doing. They’ve proved that they can reinvent what a big money maker is by making a business based on a simple text box, they’ve reinvented the way that the web browser should work, they’ve reinvented corporate culture by creating an environment that their employees want to be in — one that enhances and encourages free thinking and new ideas (the only other big companies that can be even remotely compared to the Googleplex environment? Pixar and the old Disney studios).
The best thing that has ever come about out of the Internet is the availability of long-forgotten and unavailable material. Google is doing something that I’ve been wanting to happen for years: give the masses access to the information and content that has been restricted to collectors and librarians for years. We shouldn’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a rare book just for the information within.
This isn’t going to hurt the collectors market. Collectors always understand that a first edition of Huckleberry Finn is worth a lot more than the dollar store edition.
This may even cause more people to be interested in collecting rare books, even if only just to contribute to Google.
What we need now is for this to spread throughout the other forms of media. There are thousands of hours of movie footage, television footage, audio recordings, etc. that are a largely untapped market, yet still could become profitable. Much of this has already been digitized to protect these from being lost forever. Why are they merely sitting on hard drives where nobody can see them? Transferring them to a hard drive space and setting up ways for people to access all of this forgotten content is a largely low-cost venture. Hopefully books are only Google’s beginnings for giving us rarities.
Thankfully, there has been some minor work in getting long out of print material to the masses. Search around iTunes long enough and you’ll start finding plenty of albums that haven’t seen a release in many, many years.
So, good luck, Google. Hope you succeed again.
Timothy, thanks for the well thought out comment.
check out http://www.archive.org. Also, my only concern is that google is becoming too powerful and it is after all a company and driven by profits.
Google could become too powerful, true — check out Cory Doctorow’s Scroogle if you haven’t yet (available for free in Kindle format from Feedbooks and other sites).
As Spiderman taught us, with great power comes great responsibility. They’ve showed us so far that they are capable of being responsible. And on occasion, careless as well (such as when they had some street-level photos of a military base on Google Earth a while back).
Thus far, though, there is definitely a lot of great things that can be said about them. After all, not many others are so willing to protect the privacy of their users to deny requests from the federal government to provide information about their users — the big companies sure have come a long way from the McCarthy era when even the unlikely started handing over lists of suspected communists over to the government to keep themselves safe.
And they’ve achieved a lot more in their short term in furthering free and open source than Linux and the like has done in their much longer history.
As with anything, it’s a wait and see. Will they become the next Microsoft? Doubtful. I see them going more in the direction of Apple so far.
My biggest problem so far with Google Books is that many of the books have been rather poor-quality scans, almost completely illegible in some cases. I don’t believe that’s always the fault of the source material. In most of those cases they were the fault of the people scanning them not taking the time to do the best scans possible. But, that’s not really too different from the control of YouTube and the like.
Google are becoming ridiculous. This has to be the worst news I have heard so far. I am not surprised that Google’s yearly growth rate has deteriorated. Every year Google becomes more of an unfocused company. Google should concentrate on what they do best and what they are known for – which is Google search and Google Adwords and stop trying to compete with Amazon who own the word ‘BOOK’ in the customers mind.
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My book has reached the end of its print run. Still sells well as second-hand. How would I contact Google with a view to publishing by ebook ?
R. Ford, You’d have to get in touch with Google through their customer service. Try leaving a comment on the official Google Blog or on Matt Cutts’ Blog.