The Fine Print of Google Print

Readers had plenty to say about Google Print, which I explored in Real Time two weeks ago, and somewhat less to say about last week's column pondering the possible rise of exer-games. (Though I did receive a few pitying attaboys for my Little League confessions.)

First, some more about Google Print. Since my column, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has written an article for the print Journal defending the program. (I found it well-argued, though of course I was on his side in the first place.) Shortly thereafter, the Association of American Publishers filed suit, objecting to the Library Program and whether or not Google needs copyright owners' permission to scan the libraries' books, or if it can simply allow publishers to opt out.

On to the letters, some of which have been edited. You can always drop me a line at realtime@wsj.com -- comments will be posted periodically in Real Time. Thanks to everybody who wrote in. Remember: If you don't want your comments considered for Real Time, please make that clear.

Tony Sanfilippo, marketing and sales director for Penn State University Press, writes: We in the non-profit scholarly publishing sector have a lot at stake.

Google is claiming that the Google Print Libraries Project is one of the largest leaps forward for human knowledge ever attempted, and quite arguably it is. There is something very admirable about organizing the ideas of humankind to make them more accessible to everyone. But because they are doing it outside of the scope of traditional copyright protection, others argue that while it may serve an enormous public good, it is in fact the wrong way to go about it. Is any public good so great, so beneficial that it needn't concern it self with the ethical, legal, or economic ramifications of its process?

I work at a non-profit university press. Four of the five libraries in the Google Print Libraries Project are university libraries. Much if not all of what we have published in our 50-year history is in those libraries that Google is proposing to scan. In fact, that's probably true of almost every American university press. While we share a mission with Google and the libraries involved -- namely the dissemination of human knowledge -- we are very concerned that what they are doing with our collective past may irrevocably hurt the production of knowledge in the future.

It's my belief that Google is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Google is making at least two digital copies of our books, using one to index and giving one to the library. Those copies are payment by Google to those libraries for access to the books. Google is claiming that their use of this content falls within the guidelines of fair use because they won't show users the whole book. While displaying only a snippet of content may qualify as fair use, using an unauthorized full copy as a payment is clearly a copyright infringement.

My primary objection is that we will lose the opportunity to sell those digital files of our content ourselves. These libraries are among our best customers. Each of the libraries in question probably has 70% to 90% of what we've published over the past 50 years. The files of just our content that Google is giving each library are conservatively worth tens of thousands of dollars, if we had been allowed to sell them those files. The libraries involved have all bought or subscribed to our digital content in the past. Now they won't need to anymore. That loss of income means many new books won't get published. That means scholarship and the advancement of knowledge may suffer more than any advantage gained by the indices Google creates.

Without university presses, a lot of scholarship wouldn't get vetted, edited and designed. Do we want to chuck the whole commercial model for the production of scholarship? Perhaps we should. But as long as there is a perceived value in measuring scholarship in the marketplace, and until university administrators decide we should chuck it, we're dependent on that model and we must abide by the rules that environment imposes. Our non-profit university press, like most, has a clear mandate from our administration: be sustainable. If we make less money, we publish fewer books.

Google claims we have been given the "opportunity" of opting out by submitting a form listing what we'd like to exclude from the project. Since when do we request the potential victim of a crime to fill out a form to opt out of that crime? The compilation of that list in and of itself would take a lot of resources. We've been publishing for 50 years, Penn has been publishing for over 100 years, Johns Hopkins University Press has been publishing for over 125 years. The amount of scholarship involved is enormous, involving hundreds of thousands of books just from university presses. Why should it be the responsibility of the university-press community to do that work? As a not-for-profit, we simply can't afford it. Those resources should be spent creating new scholarly content, not fending off the theft of our previously published content.

When we want to use someone else's work in one of our publications, we ask for permission and sometimes pay for it. Google should do the same. The onus is on Google, not us. While what Google is proposing is an admirable goal, they need to do it on their own dime, not by illegally exploiting the work of others.

The issue of those digital copies to libraries seems to have gotten short shrift in a lot of accounts, including mine. It needs to be addressed. Thanks for the letter.

Michael Ward writes: You're right. Speaking as an independent publisher, I can reassure you that obscurity is a much greater threat to most authors than Google ever will be. Invisibility, lack of notice, unfamiliarity; insert a knapsack of Roget words of your own choice here.

Perhaps to a tres gran fromage of the Author's Guild the Google experiment is a source of fear. Most writers would be thrilled to imagine an impecunious proto-reader struggling with some combination of Print Screen, fake user names, and linear interpolation to make his way through their books via Google.

The library issue is a digression. Truth is, of course, that the value of an old books is somewhere between one cent plus shipping (check out the Amazon Marketplace for thousands of used books offered at a penny), and the half-cover price you may see at Recycle Books. Google could simply buy all the old books they ever wanted to scan. The cost of doing this is round-off error in Google's quarterlies.

Asher Meir writes: I recently published two books and I jumped at the chance to make them searchable. One of my publishers already takes part in the program; the other doesn't but told me they have no objections to having me upload my book. As you write, the most frustrating thing for a writer is to work hard to express your message and know that the reading public has no way of finding or benefiting from your efforts.

But as far as fair use is concerned, I think you're too hasty. To me Google Print smells like a commercial use. Napster never sold songs but it profited from having the songs streamed through their site and Judge Patel ruled that this was a commercial use. More precisely, she concluded that it was not a personal use. Here's the quote from the injunction: "Given the vast scale which Napster and the Internet can in fact access -- numbers and numbers of users -- and that the uses among anonymous individuals, not just a sharing among friends and typical of the more private use, that cases have seen at the very least a host user sending a file cannot be said to engage merely in the typical personal use when distributing the file to, in this case, many anonymous requesters."

Google's use of book content is similar.

Anyway, I'm not a lawyer and I can't comment too much in depth on the legal side, but as an author I can tell you that I'm delighted to have my books made searchable and as a member of the human race I'm proud to know that we have the desire and ability to collect our literary achievements and make them universally available.

I think Google's use of book content is pretty different. The original Napster (it's been reborn as a legal music service) let people find songs which they then downloaded in their entirety, damaging the market for those songs. Google Print surfaces snippets of book text searched, not the entire book (unless it's in the public domain). If anything, it seems to me that Google Print creates more of a market for the books found.

Chuck Tanowitz writes: There is another option that no one seems to be talking about, though I did blog about it here: What if Google wants to become a printer?

Hear me out on this. The printing industry has been struggling with the idea of print-on-demand services. Some things, like those photo books you can buy at Shutterfly, have taken hold. But a key element that has been talked about for years is the elimination of the term "out of print." With current printing technology this should be easy.

However, how big of a market is there for out-of-print books that can't already be satisfied by a good used-book shop? And how do people know they even want a book that's out of print?

This is where Google comes in. They don't want the full version of a book just because of search technology, but they want to be able to print it for you too. This actually helps authors. Since they don't get a cut of used book sales, but they would get a cut of this "new" book sale.

That would indeed be interesting, though Google would of course have to strike a new round of deals with copyright owners to do that. This brings us to the next letter….

Max Bouvier writes: All your points seems to make solid sense except the one about a limitless audience being able to buy "forgotten" authors' works. There's really not a chance for these authors. If their book didn't sell, it likely won't be available later for a sale that directly benefits the author. (Odds are the print run was 5,000 to 20,000.) It'll be remaindered, or sold as used, neither situation resulting in any real royalty to the author. Sure, the author's words will be out there, but out there with those of so many other writers, some successful, some not. Maybe it's immortality. But it doesn't translate into sales, just a warm fuzzy feeling that someone might be reading their work.

I agree Google Print isn't likely to transform lots of forgotten authors' lives, but I don't think things are necessarily as grim as your scenario. If publishers see a large number of search hits on an out-of-print book, they might consider reprinting it. And as Mr. Tanowitz noted, Google Print results could easily link to print-on-demand services, whether they're offered by a publisher, Amazon or Google itself.

Joseph Harris writes: If you attack others' red herrings, don't take your own out of the box. The point is not searchability, but the creation of a digital copy. That digital copy is then available for -- well, let's save that for when Google changes its mind after a multi-billion pound (or dollar!) change of ownership.

Copyright law is clear. Google is not a library but by using libraries it is trying to graft on the necessarily special way libraries treat copyright works. It is the attempt to rewrite law on this before a dozing judge that is worrying. And because the U.S. firm of Google bestrides the world every country is affected.

Google is a commercial entity that is usurping the rights of the copyright owner. However much you -- or even I -- might think that the planned database could be a good thing, the theft of copyright is not an acceptable act.

Even on searchability there is the question of how you monitor what Google will do: how open to accident or corruption the search results will be; and how, in the end, you control a monolith.

Let Microsoft be your warning. Let the need to put law before the deep pocket be your mantra.

That's a good mantra. But suppose Google did change hands and the new owners did something nefarious with those digital copies – using them to print books on demand and not compensating the copyright owner, to pick a far-fetched case. That would clearly not be covered under fair use, Google would be instantly sued, and it would lose. The mere existence of a digital copy has been made to sound ominous, but I don't see it.

Michael Pettengill writes: If I'm selling a book for $150 but another book offers the same information for $50 -- or worse, a public-domain work provides the same information, then Google is going to take my market away from me unless I lower my price. But if I must go through a large publisher, I may be forced to take the biggest hit on the lowered price.

To the extent that Google makes it easy for consumers to find substitutes and to discover that my book is more of a commodity than my publisher and I would like it to be considered, Google is a bad thing.

Seems like consumers would see this scenario a bit differently, no?

Gerry Schulze writes: For business and for pleasure I study a few obscure topics. I have used Google Print to update my research and study on several occasions (so far mostly for pleasure), and at least half the time I have clicked on the Amazon link and either bought a book or put one on my wish list. On almost every occasion, the book was one I was unaware of until I did the Google search. I am sure I'm not the only one. The publishing industry should stop and think before it launches a challenge to this very effective free advertising.

Tom Klein writes: You seem to have left out a pretty valuable piece of information when it comes to Google's scheme to scan books. My understanding is that these books will only be searchable via Google (even those out of copyright), not available otherwise on the Web or accessible from other search engines.

As an author of a narrowly focused title, I'd be fine if the whole thing were published online -- easy to access. However, I wouldn't want to leave out the large percentage of people who use other search engines.

Would you?

As I understand it, such deals aren't exclusive to Google -- the other search engines are free to follow suit.

Robert Wilson writes: If you can't find something with Google, then it might as well not exist. Google Print is the best thing for authors and publishers since the Gutenberg press. Their objections to Google Print seem terribly shortsighted.

Jeff Webb writes: I am an author with work searchable through Google Print. Since my book has been listed sales are up. That's great, and I've uploaded other works which are currently pending with Google.

That said, I am not a lawyer, but after reading the law I am absolutely convinced that Google's opt-out approach flagrantly violates copyright law. Google receives a profit from listing the copyrighted work through paid ad placements. They also violate provisions on the number of copies and distribution of those copies specifically cited in the law. And they significantly alter the presentation of the work.

Google Print benefits me, but I don't agree that opt-out gives them legal cover. Copyright is property, and only the owner can choose who is allowed to intrude.

Ads don't appear on search results from the Library Project; they appear on search results for books in the Publishing Program if the publishers have allowed Google to do so, and the publishers then get a cut of that. How much of that goes to authors and how much to publishers strikes me as a fight between authors and publishers.

Tom Lewis writes: You miss the point. The most-contentious battles between publishers and authors and their agents and lawyers is over electronic-publishing rights. The publishers want it all forever and for nothing and the authors want fair compensation. Google is a very ambitious company which will at some point in the future claim some sort of ownership over what they've scanned. If authors don't fight for their rights, they will have none.

Authors and publishers redux. It's human nature that if two people have been fighting over something for a long time and a third person somehow enters the picture, one or both of the two combatants will try to settle their differences by taking a chunk out of the new arrival's hide. As for claiming ownership of what it's scanned, if Google did that it would be instantly sued, and lose.

Joe Sestrich writes: I think Google Print is an excellent idea -- it strikes me as certainly fair use, and advantageous to both Google and authors and publishers.

But it reminds me of a serious issue that has been getting worse: the lifetime of a copyright. This entire concept in the law was supposed to foster the creation of works valuable to society. But recent changes setting the life of a copyright to the author's lifetime plus a zillion or two, is simply lobbyist-induced license to steal for successful authors, and the removal of much utility to society of most copyrighted work. Quite a bit of such material has a lifetime measured in much shorter units of time than centuries. Doesn't society get any of this value?

* * *

On to exer-games...

David Ludwick writes: I enjoyed your article, but found its subject discouraging. I too was relegated to right field as a youth in baseball -- something about a lack of eye-hand coordination. I also missed the Atari and the Nintendo age because of school and work. Now I work in the IT industry with the "geeks." I myself am not necessarily technologically gifted, but I call many geeks my friends, so naturally they expect me to play along with them on their many different videogame adventures. Unfortunately, eye-hand coordination is required for this as well. Halo from Microsoft seems to be one of my biggest challenges, but I thought I was finally starting to improve. I am not looking forward to the advent of exer-gaming. Sometimes I think my friends invite me along so that they have someone to beat, but I do it for the camaraderie. So even if they do move to exer-gaming, at least I'll be getting in better shape as I lose.

You and me both. I never play a game on multiplayer mode, because I would instantly absorb a humiliating beatdown -- and then get mocked by some 13-year-old l33t-head. Hang in there.

* * *

Finally, here's a flashback to June's Real Time about Penguin offering a library collection of 1,082 books for a bit under $8,000, via Amazon. If you've read all those Penguins, maybe it's time for the ultimate Star Trek collection, featuring DVDs of all 10 movies and complete collections of five different Star Trek series. Price tag: $2,500.

I'm a Star Wars guy, so this isn't for me. (Star Wars fans and Star Trek fans are like Mets and Yankees fans -- little overlap and plenty of mutual contempt.) But being a completist geek, I'm happy it exists. Star Trek fans being Star Trek fans, they're already complaining it's not complete -- it's missing the animated series. Then there are other Star Trek fans who say it's too complete, since they loathe some of the movies and/or series. Then there are other fans who say….

Google Tests
Offering Classifieds --
And Vying With eBay

Google Inc. is testing a service called Google Base that could put it squarely in competition with eBay Inc., newspapers and other sellers of classified ads.

Google Base would let users submit information, including classified-like listings of items for sale, to a searchable Google database, according to Web pages from Google's test that were intermittently available to the public.

If the Web-search company goes ahead with the service, it could compete with classified providers such as newspapers, online listing services such as Craigslist Inc. -- which is minority-owned by eBay -- and listing sites specializing in areas such as jobs and real estate.

A screenshot of the test page for Google Base.

Google's presumed ability to make listings available free of charge, financed directly or indirectly by its potent online advertising system, could make it a particularly formidable competitor to eBay, which charges seller fees to list items on most of its sites. Google has already said it is working on an online payment service, which could compete with eBay's PayPal electronic-payment service.

But the millions of listings eBay handles -- as well as features like its seller rating system -- give it an advantage that has stymied all major U.S. rivals in the past, since buyers and sellers tend to flock to the listing sites with the most items for sale and the most traffic.

Google Base could also have significant ramifications for the newspaper industry, which is already hurting because classified listings and other advertising have shifted to the Web. Google's interest in collecting nonclassified content through Google Base -- which may include user-generated news and reference articles, reviews, and events listings -- could intensify the challenge to traditional media.