They're not presenting the entire book, are they? I thought it was just short excerpts matching your search queries - essentially the same thing they do for (also copryighted) websites.
That's correct, though I 've managed to read useful amounts of a book (several pages) in response to a search such that it was much the same as if I had the book on a shelf, flipped open to the part I needed, got what I wanted, and closed the book. In other words, it saved me the expense of having to get the whole book.
The same argument applies to someone who read the book in question, wrote a blog post summary of it, and quoted the most useful or valuable sections. If your entire book can be summarized by a few pages, you've got worse problems.
It's like arguing that a movie trailer gave away the best parts of the movie, so you have no need to watch the movie.
If your entire book can be summarized by a few pages, you've got worse problems.
Well, what I got from such cases was not a summary of a book, but useful code or math or a technical explanation. Google book search can work like a reference library, and if it's really good at that then I can see how it might cut into sales.
For example, if someone publishes a cookbook (for food or code, for that matter) it seems possible that people could just search for the small-ish section they need and never have to buy that book.
In practice I suspect the number of actual lost sales because of this is minuscule.
This situation reminds me somewhat of the situation of music before song purchases, where you'd be forced to buy an entire CD just to get one song. It may very well be that the modern textbook is the wrong model, and authors in the digital age should design their books to be purchased or consumed in a more fine grained fashion.
If a $200 math textbook instead was published as a series of $2.99 chapters, students would be less likely to try to steal or avoid payment.
Most cases of piracy come down to distribution, delivery, and convenience simply being improperly aligned with consumer demand. Do people pirate Game of Thrones because they don't want to pay for it, or because HBO makes it too inconvenient and expensive for the majority of people demanding it?
The song/CD analogy is really good. If a book is mainly a collection of discrete parts then Google book search makes it easier to read the stuff you care about.
[A]uthors in the digital age should design their books to be purchased or consumed in a more fine grained fashion.
Very true!
I've started, ever so slowly, to self-publish some technical books that I've deliberately try to keep small. I want to offer just the best parts, remove the fluff and filler: http://justthebestparts.com
It pained me to buy pricey books just for one or two chapters, and I see no reason now not to publish things in more digestible and accessible chunks.
In a past life I did some writing for Wrox Press (the previous, went bankrupt, version) and the editors were often very keen and having extraneous detail added rather than encourage people to either Google it or, perish the thought, go get another book (unless it was a Wrox book).
If they gave you the page number and a smaller excerpt, you could have gone to a local bookstore to read the extra couple of pages without purchasing the book. Should we ban bookstores now?
