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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
But if it's true that Google's new system would be good for old books, it's also true that the system would be a good one for Google, helping to cement its position as the world's dominant search engine. Nobody knows -- and Google isn't saying -- how much money the company stands to make directly from the library venture. In a recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, sought to play down the company's profit motive. He pointed out that the company will not place advertisements on search pages for books it scans from libraries; and though Google will place ads on pages for books that publishers have given the company permission to include, it will send publishers the "majority" of revenue for such ads, Schmidt wrote. Google will include a referral link to let people purchase books they find in the library -- a "Buy this book" link to several major online bookstores -- but the company won't "make a penny on referrals," he wrote.
Rather than making money from the individual book searches, Google's library will pad Google's bottom line by increasing the value of its main search engine. Although Google remains by far the world's most popular search engine, it faces stiff competition from other firms -- Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and others -- who want a share of its vast audience, and are also planning ventures to digitize and offer search systems for print books and other media. By offering something -- millions of books -- that others are not yet offering, Google will be creating another reason for users to stick with its interface for searching the Web.
But Google's competitors are not far behind; Amazon, which already offers a feature to search inside many books in its store, has just announced a plan to let users buy specific pages of books. Microsoft and Yahoo, meanwhile, have joined the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit group that includes contributions from the Internet Archive and the University of California at Berkeley, and that plans to digitize books only after asking for publishers' permission.
It's Google's profit motive that raises the suspicion of authors and publishers. As they see it, digital technology provides authors and publishers a new way to make a great deal of money on their back catalogs of books -- a huge source of revenue that is currently being untapped. Google is creating a system that exploits that back catalog, so why shouldn't Google pay content owners for the right use of that catalog?
"The author is creating the value here," says Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, "and the author should get some of the money. If there's a new value for books created on the Internet, the authors should be given new incentives to create works for it."
Aiken compares Google's plan to use books with the way Hollywood uses novels as plots for its movies. When film producers first started making movies from books, "They could have said, 'Hey, how does it hurt the author if I make a movie from his book?'" Aiken points out. "You could argue, after all, that more people would buy the book because of the movie." But that's not the way the world works, Aiken says. Hollywood pays publishers for the rights to novels they want to use, and in the same way, Google should pay publishers -- who would then distribute money to authors -- for the right to add books to its database. Aiken declined to offer a detailed, specific plan by which Google could pay authors for their contributions to its search engine. But he suggested one idea might look very much like the system that radio stations use to pay musicians. Google could pay an annual licensing fee to publishers, and the money would be distributed to publishers and authors according to how often those books were viewed in the search engine.
Aiken's argument is echoed by publishers. Google, notes Pat Schroeder -- the former Democratic congresswoman from Colorado who now heads the Association of American Publishers -- is rich! Both Schroeder and Aiken fingered Google's latest earnings report, which showed that the company recorded a 700 percent increase in profits in the third quarter compared with the same quarter last year. In 2004, the company's revenues exceeded $3 billion, and the firm could make double that much by the end of the current fiscal year. In other words, Google is sitting on a gold mine, and authors and publishers, notably, are not. "They try to sound like they have this high moral purpose so they can't be bothered with permission," Schroeder says of Google. "They tell us it's good for the world, and it's good for publishers. The thing they leave out is it's really good for Google."
The Authors Guild hasn't conducted a survey of its members to determine what they think of the Google plan, but Aiken says the e-mails he gets from authors run overwhelmingly in support of the Guild's lawsuit against the company. There's no reason not to believe Aiken; it's not hard to find authors who are deeply suspicious of what Google plans to do. Take Peter Salus, a veteran author of computer books who lives in Toronto. Salus has authored, co-authored or edited about two dozen books, some of which are in print, and some of which are not. He says that he understands the benefits of Google Print -- but he just wants the company to do one thing in return: ask his permission.
"I think it's absurd that they think the authors should have to come to them to opt out of the database," rather than the other way around, Salus says. Because Google's project directly benefits from his and his fellow authors' work, Salus says, it's incumbent upon the company to make sure that authors are O.K. with what it's doing. And what if it's too logistically difficult for Google to find every author of every book in the library and ask his or her permission? "That's tough -- it really breaks my heart," he says. "But there is no burden on me or anybody else to make it easier for them to make money."
Many authors feel differently. One is Julian Dibbell, author of "My Tiny Life," a memoir of the author's life in the virtual computer world called LambdaMOO. When told of Aiken's theory that Google's database would use authors like him in the same way that Hollywood might use them, and authors should get paid for allowing their books to go to Google, Dibbell said, "My blood is boiling just as you relay this to me." As Dibbell sees it, "Google is not piggybacking on my creative effort in the same parasitic way that a movie based on a novel might be doing." To Dibbell, Google is acting not like the Hollywood producer who steals an author's ideas, but instead like a book reviewer who popularizes an author's work. After all, Dibbell notes, book reviewers routinely use snippets from books in their reviews, and magazines and newspapers make loads of money from advertisements they run alongside book reviews. Authors don't feel entitled to any of that money, he says, so why should they get a slice of the money Google will make from its service? "Given what's at stake here, which is the creation of a resource that nobody is denying is a good thing, their stance seems wrong to me," Dibbell says of his fellow authors.
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