

Google to sell eBooks - qeorge
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/technology/internet/01google.html

======
pj
_Google has scanned more than seven million volumes from several university
libraries. ... The settlement ... provides for a way for Google to sell
digital access to the scanned volumes._

The authors and publishers said Google is stealing our content, violating our
copyright. So Google replied that their intent is benevolent. They didn't want
to harm the publishers or take their money, they didn't even want to make
money. They said they were scanning these books to create searchable
knowledge. Then they strike up a settlement so they can sell those scanned in
books? Now they want to compete with Amazon to sell ebooks...

It was a lie from the start. They were just scanning in these books because
they knew they'd be selling them one day. They wanted a head start. They lied
about the race to give themselves an advantage over Amazon now. This doesn't
sound "not evil" to me. Lying is not "good." Maybe it isn't evil, but is "not
being evil" the standard now? Shouldn't companies rise above merely "not evil"
??

They lied, they violated the law and the copyright holders and now they are
going to be allowed to profit from this illegal behavior.

Their words are not matching their behavior and that is a real negative sign
in my opinion.

~~~
sown
I don't think it's quite like that. Google still has to pay royalties and
depending on how much the royalties end up being publishers would probably be
happy.

There's no need to make this out to be a conspiracy, though.

~~~
berntb
>There's no need to make this out to be a conspiracy, though.

You don't generally keep up with the times, do you?

~~~
berntb
People took that seriously or was it too low class humor?

(Is it just me that hears conspiracy theories much more often now than, say,
ten years ago?)

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jwvgoethe
If google can offer for sale a significant fraction of the books they
currently serve, I will be happy. However, The current state of the ebook
market is unexciting. There are too many proprietary formats, often tied to
some specific piece of software. Furthermore, ebooks often do not carry a
significant enough discount over the print edition to make up for the
restrictions in my opinion. I've come to this conclusion myself after I
purchased an ebook, found a passage revelatory and wanted to show it to a
friend, but realized that I did not have printing rights. So I was forced to
go out and buy a hard copy.

I think ebooks will go the same way as digital music. Once the market becomes
mature enough, consumers will demand the wares without draconion DRM
restrictions which currently make the e reading experience unpleasant.

~~~
jrockway
_There are too many proprietary formats, often tied to some specific piece of
software._

Kindle books are just HTML with the extension changed and some trivial
"encryption" on top. The encryption is there to give the publishers some
illusion of security -- but if you want to read your books on a computer or
other device, it's easy to remove the DRM. Once you do that, open your web
browser on the resulting file, and enjoy. (All of your indexing tools that
take HTML input files work quite nicely.)

DRM is "evil" and all that, but I don't worry about it since it's so trivial
to remove, and always will be. If you can see it, you can copy it.

~~~
pj
Maybe it's the removing of the DRM that is evil? I mean, it is there to
protect the producer and help the producer ensure a stream of revenue and an
incentive to produce more content for you in the future.

Would you want a future without content worth buying? Why can't you just live
with the DRM?

~~~
bjelkeman-again
And how do you create a DRM that doesn't suck?

Dead tree books have DRM which works, albeit in a shape which isn't digital.
It is a pain to copy a 300 page novel, but you can do it (there are of course
copyright limitations). But all DRM systems implemented fail in comparison. Of
course, comparing the two directly is hard as they are very different media.

Books work well because: \- they don't stop working when the DRM vendor goes
out of business (see all the music sites now gone) \- you can give them and
lend them without problems \- they are compatible (i.e. you changing to a new
computing platform doesn't mean that you can't now read your books)

When the convenience of electronic distribution with DRM overcomes the
drawbacks then you are going to see some uptake, but the drawbacks seem too
large at this point.

To have a future with content worth buying, then maybe the business model
needs to change? However, book readings aren't quite as attractive as touring
bands. So that is going to take some good thinking. :)

~~~
pj
How do you create an honest society? Which is easier, DRM that doesn't suck,
or consumers who don't "share?" I don't know the answer.

I think we are entering an age of consciousness. The realization that we can
lie is a natural stage of maturation, a later stage is the realization that
lying has negative consequences. Maybe we as a digital society need to go
through a similar stage of honest consumerism. Buying things, not because we
are forced to, but because we want to give producers an incentive to produce.

We could all smash windows, steal cars, bump locks... security is an illusion.
We can defeat it if we want to, but we don't have to. We can all win. Life is
not a zero sum game.

A balance will be achieved. If it is not achieved, then the producers will
simply stop producing and life will be worse for all of us or at least for the
producers or perhaps the distributors.

I don't have the answers, but we are raised to know that stealing is wrong.
Honesty is the best policy. Golden rule.

Sounds simplistic, perhaps naive, but maybe that's the answer. Personally, I
stopped stealing music a long time ago. Now I listen to streaming radio online
or I flip through Youtube videos from the distributors' channels or that kind
of thing.

My point is, there are "honest" alternatives to stealing products, digital or
otherwise.

I don't know why we create this sense of us versus them. We share this planet.
If you make my life better, I want you to be around to continue making it
better and I know you need to eat. I think that's the answer. Build a sense of
community around the product, the producer, the consumer and the future where
we all benefit from our shared existence.

~~~
asciilifeform
> How do you create an honest society?

How about wiping out all forms of artificial scarcity?

------
scorpioxy
"allow publishers to charge consumers the same price for digital editions as
they do for new hardcover versions."

Really? And what happens when customers refuse to pay the same amount? I've
always said, that ebooks are still too expensive. Personally, if an ebook is
$10 less than a hardcover version, then I prefer it. Otherwise, not much of a
difference.

------
conflux0
The fact that google is going to leave the pricing structure to the publishers
disappointed me. While the flexibility draws in more publishers the publisher
acceptable pricepoint will not be competitive with the likes of Amazon.

------
jsz0
I have no interest in buying e-books but, if I did, I would probably continue
to use Amazon since I can just order the print copy when there's no e-book
version available and have the option of using them on a Kindle. (again, if I
wanted e-books which I really do not)

------
netsp
I think one class of mistake we are going to hear all the time is that
arguments from music applied to ebooks.

One example is the case for against copyright protection for authors.

------
xcombinator
hehe, It makes me laugh when they say they expect a "secure format" from
google. Once in screen format, it takes a minute to copy automatically a book
to a bitmap, and then do whatever you want with it(OCR).

About the same price for a book than an ebook, I suspect they are drunk.
People is not going to pay the same price for something that has been
manufactured, transported, and stored, for something that cost pennies to
sell.Period.

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ahoyhere
This isn't about selling the books they scanned, but a separate project.

This sounds remarkably like when they tried to reach out and do print, video
and radio ads. Even though it looked like something that was related to their
core offering, it flopped hugely.

They are overreaching.

To get legs under an ebook-selling project, a company has to devote a lot of
resources to promotion, the ecosystem, and making users happy.

That's why Amazon's gotten a much higher adoption rate for the Kindle than
Sony has for the Reader. Sony was like "Eh, we'll make an ebook reader" and
(seemingly) didn't invest much in the service and ecosystem. The device was
fine. But the Kindle whoops its ass because you can order books from anywhere
in, what is it, 49 states? And people are used to buying all their books from
Amazon already.

I don't really see Google doing things that differently from Sony. They have
so many projects going on already that seem neglected.

I think this is a strategy that's going to fail.

------
TweedHeads
...at 99cts.

Now that's disrupting.

