It is increasingly clear to libraries, publishers, and information providers that the value of books and other published media content stems from their aggregation, and the services that aggregation generates for enriching personalized and community use. In other words, the value of a digital collection of books is not from the books, but from the collection. As in so many other areas, aggregation trumps the value of granular content, and in ways that reach far beyond the ability to provide a search interface across a larger mass of material.

In this situation, the contract concerns of authors are arguably radically transformed. Increasingly the value of the rights associated with a book is less “the book” but rather the bundle of information that the book represents, and the value generated from its aggregation with other works. If I was an author, I would be concerned about negotiating rights not only for issues relating to the production, sale, and marketing of my “book” but also for the additive value that is generated by the publisher and its partners in their aggregation of my book with other materials, both text and – as in the case of the very largest media companies – the combination with other media properties. Further, publishers are increasingly distributing content to other players, including Google and Amazon, which benefit from the aggregation of services across content. If a particular work strongly informs a content recommending function for a particular market niche, is the author without recourse to compensation for that enhanced value to the service? Does she share in the advertising revenue from re-combinant services that do not explicitly present the book as “book”?

Authors are not negotiating for these rights now, and publishers would probably be loath to raise awareness of this suite of issues. There is no best practice guide, and not much in the way of useful prior art – no new-generation license templates exist for authors and publishers.

For publishers, there are further complications. Publishing firms seek to avoid their titles going out of print, and in a digital world there is enhanced value from long tail access and consequent sales, with potentially reduced unit marketing costs; these factors shift the calculation of the advisability of letting registration lapse or of negotiating a rights reversion to the author – particularly digital rights.

But if rights do lapse, then what happens to the “smartness” that the book’s digital content contributed to the repositories in which it resides? Reversion might imply a loss of information to the system. Do social sites need to redact the book’s content from all digital permutations? Can personalization, recommending, and other social services continue to utilize the underlying media content if the publisher removes the book from page views and downloads? If a book reverts to an author, does the repository index have to be recalculated if inclusion rights are not re-negotiated with the rights-holder/s?

How many of these issues are informed by the existing case law relating to web search and harvest? Perhaps the periphery has been litigated, but I am very curious how the current treatment of intellectual property law would contort to accommodate these issues.

2007:05:10