In response to: GBS is not a bookstore

Alexander Macgillivray [Visitor] — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:29:29 +0000

Peter, always refreshing to be called disingenuous and intellectually vapid (grin).

I believe your point in this post there are no other ways to search inside books and get access to them instantaneously (but not through eBooks? -- I may be misrepresenting your thoughts here, the post was not entirely clear). I'm not sure that's the most relevant question, but I think you may be overlooking a bunch of currently existing services. For example, the OCA and Guttenberg are good places to start for public domain material. For in-copyright books Amazon provides search, access to preview and eBooks (presumably they might switch to online access as well as eBooks if they think it is a good model) and, from what I understand based on Brewster's recent talk at Michigan, the OCA will soon provide search and access for in-copyright out-of-print works too (with a goal of getting more than ten million books in its program). Those are just a few off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more and, if we’re successful, more will be created. It is true that each project may have a different corpus and that Google Book Search will likely have books in our corpus that others do not and vice versa.

The settlement, along with our notice and registry start up money, should make it easier for those projects that want licenses for online access to get them for a large number of books. For the others, some will proceed with models that they believe do not require licenses (such as the OCA's proposed approach for access, or fair use scanning and indexing) or work to secure similar licenses to the one we have proposed either through legislation, another settlement, which may be similar to or different from ours, or in some other innovative way. Whether other services end up having a corpus that is as big as ours will depend on whether they think that is important and are willing to commit the resources to get it done. We hope to prove that being able to search and provide access to these books is useful and worth the effort.

I do think that eBooks are useful -- I'm not sure why you seemed to not count services that provide search and eBooks. And, I think that non-instantaneous access is also useful, such as the ability to quickly buy an actual physical copy of a book or find one in a nearby library (our plan is to keep both options as part of Google Book Search).

Anyhow, I've included the actual text from my email to Siva below -- I didn't take his question to be the same as yours, so my answer to him was different (it is about reading books). I, or other members of the Google team, would be happy to discuss at greater length.

-Alex

"Your second question is about other major search engines and the OCA. Our basic approach there is and has always been to have our agreements with libraries and now with the registry be non-exclusive. So, though we are funding the registry startup costs, it is a non-profit that will be able to do deals with other companies (or the OCA) -- though the deals they actually do will be up to them and the rightsholders (we don't control the registry). We expect that the registry will be very helpful in representing or connecting rightsholders with licensors with respect both to online services and other potential licenses. We also hope that this agreement can serve as a model and proof of concept for others, though whether others take advantage of this model is really up to them. You'll note that there are significant provisions in the agreement to ensure that the Registry is able to do these deals if it wants to (and I believe they will).

I think that's also the gist of your "anti-trust" comment above though it doesn't seem to be a typical anti-trust argument. There is already an active online market for books that publishers, first- and second-hand bookstores, retailers and aggregators have been developing for many years. The agreement is designed to provide another avenue for these books to be bought, sold and more easily discovered. The agreement doesn't restrict others, though it is true that it also doesn't preemptively secure intellectual property rights for others or include agreements with authors or publishers for those rights (I'm sure OCA and others would have thought it quite presumptuous for us to agree to anything on their behalf). We also haven't globally solved the orphan works problem. As you know, we've supported reasonable orphan works legislation in the past and we will continue to do so."

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In response to: GBS is not a bookstore