With e-readers launching, is it the last chapter for bookshops?

The current talk in publishing centers around the launch of Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader in Europe and other parts of the world and the effect that it will have on the book retail industry as we know it.

Amazon revolutionised bookselling in its short existence, probably in the same way in which Apple is changing the music retail industry. Is it about to do so yet again with the international debut of Kindle, which is seen by many as the “iPod” of the book market.

Originally launched in the US in November 2007, Amazon expects sales of Kindle to pass the 1 million mark by the end of this year. The wireless device — which must be bought through Amazon’s US website for the time being — will enable UK customers to download books in less than a minute using 3G technology.

Shoppers in Europe will have access to about 280,000 books as well as some international newspapers and magazines. However, on top of the $279 (£176) cost, UK consumers will pay more than their US counterparts in for books – $13.99 (£8.80) rather than $9.99 (£6.30) – as a result of Amazon’s higher operating costs outside its domestic market.

It remains to be seen what business model Amazon intends for the South African market but even more so, how the introduction of the Kindle in South Africa will impact on the historic territorial distribution rights of local publishers on the distribution of overseas books in South Africa.

Does the rise of ebooks and e-readers mean that bookshops will die in the long run?

The advent of e-readers is part of the emerging digital age and retailers need to reassess how they do business. To say it’s the end of the bookshop might be premature but it does put pressure on individual book retailers and they need to quickly adapt.

Books and Ereaders is good for publishers, authors, customers and retailers, it’s new and exciting, it’s convenient, it’s in line with trends and fashionable. It’s got the opportunity to drive new readers.” One in four people claim not to read a single book in a year, but the new technology may extend the category’s appeal.

Device wars

Kindle may be a proprietary Amazon product, but the giant will not necessarily have things all its own way. At present Kindle is seen to have an advantage because of its wireless technology. Users of other e-readers typically need to link to a PC to buy books. But Sony, for instance, has developed its own wireless e-reader, which is expected to debut in the US this December. As well as enabling users to buy books, it will allow them to “borrow” titles from libraries. Sony has also switched away from a proprietary format for ebooks and adopted the ePub open format, meaning shoppers can buy from a variety of sources to read on the devices.

More devices will be added to the market, which is why publishers and retailers will need to support the industry standard format for ebooks- ePub. By utilising the ePub format in e-readers, customers are given the freedom to choose which device they read their content on, and this will help authors and publishers reach as large a part of this rapidly expanding market as possible.

Kindle and similar devices will eat into physical book sales just a mp3’s ate CD’s, just as travel guides, are already being affected by digital technology – people now use their iPhone as a guide.

Market analyst Forrester has little doubt that e-readers are here to stay and expects such products to be a “breakout success” in the US over Christmas. It forecasts sales of 900,000 units in November and December and increased its expected sell-through this year from 2 million to 3 million units. “We expect sales in 2010 to double, bringing cumulative sales to 10 million by year-end 2010,” Forrester says.

Is it back to square one in the Google Book Settlement?

By Bertus Preller

The US Department of Justice came out of the ring and threw some destructive punches at Google this week. It’s uppercut on Google’s chin asserted that that the agreement could violate antitrust law.

As a result of this latest technical blow in the fight of the heavy weights, the hearing that was set for October 7 to approve the proposed settlement has now been postponed with the agreement of Google. The parties will try to put together a new settlement and have proposed November 9 as the date when they will all meet to discussion the adjusted terms.

Members of the Open Book Alliance, which vehemently opposed the settlement from their corner, are dancing in the ring. Member organizations include the likes of Amazon.com, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Microsoft, the National Writers Union, the New York Library Association and Yahoo — some of whom will, under usual circumstances, not spar in the same ring to avoid being seen together. In this case, however, they agreed and joined the fight.

This can be regarded as a huge victory for the many organizations that raised important and significant concerns that the settlement did not serve the public interest to its full, stifled innovation, and restricted competition.

What does this mean for the ordinary Joe Public? Well, it means that it may be a bit longer before Google e-book enthusiasts have full access to the vast array of books that are either out of print or unclaimed. Meanwhile, Joe Public will just have to make do with what he can buy through online booksellers like Amazon, or with several thousand older, public domain tomes available through sites like Project Gutenberg and who is cashing in, none other than Amazon.

Round one goes against Google, but, be aware the heavyweight is long away from throwing in the towel and might just Google its opposition slowly down its thirsty belly, which have room for more than one Amazon river.

Google’s Privacy Invasion – By Bertus Preller

The Centre for Democracy and Technology supports the Google Books settlement but in an Amicus Brief filed on Tuesday it called on the court to impose a couple of mandatory privacy requirements.

The Centre for Democracy and Technology sees the enormity of Google’s proposed position as well as anyone:

Google is in many ways taking on the role of the public library as a gateway to information, only on a much larger and more comprehensive scale. Providing such breadth of electronic access to so many published books will give Google an unparalleled view of people’s reading and information-seeking habits. By hosting the book search service and closely managing user access, Google will have the capability to collect data about individual users’ searches, preview pages visited, books purchased, and even time spent reading particular pages. … Google will hold a massive centralized repository of books and of information about how people access and read books online.

But the same goes for the world’s largest online Book distributor, Amazon.com. If Google is successful in pulling off the settlement it will not only be the world’s biggest library but also the dominant purveyor of search and behavioural advertising. What a combination!

In the absence of limitations placed on what Google can do with the data it collects about readers through the Google Book programme, Google would remain free to combine that data with other data that Google collects, thereby adding a crucial rich and personal dimension to the profiles of web surfers that Google already maintains about individuals’ searching and Web surfing habits. Reading habits add an intimate element to profiles that may already be attractive for a variety of uses

As valuable as the Google Book programme will be, without action by the Court to protect a reader’s privacy, they have the potential to transform the typical library experience from one of anonymity and privacy to one of data mining and tracking.

The Centre for Democracy and Technology called on the court to mandate and supervise a number of additional privacy requirements:

• Full disclosure. Google should prominently explain to users what personal information it collects, what content information it collects, why, how long it’s retained, technically how it’s collected, how users can opt out, how data is protected against theft.
• Limited data. Google should be allowed to collect only the data it needs to operate the program. The right to read anonymously must not be abridged.
• Hands off institutions. There’s no need for Google to authenticate individual users within a school or library.
• Annotations. Google should not be allowed annotations to be used for any purpose other than to provide the annotation feature or as users clearly consent. The fear is those annotations could provide sensitive personal information.
• User access. Users should be able to correct or delete information Google holds about them, including purchase histories, annotations and search history.

The list goes on and incorporates 12 privacy concerns. While getting the court to enforce all these privacy concerns would be vital, but is this enough?

We have to get “out of print” books online, that is a fact, but won’t it be better to create a consortium of libraries, not just outsource digital libraries to one company like Google?

As a legal, policy, and practical matter, readers have long enjoyed a high level of anonymity and privacy with respect to their reading habits, as one element of their broader – and constitutionally-based – interest in privacy over their personal information.

The Google book service represents a total change with respect to the treatment of access to material that has historically been held by libraries. Google is in many ways taking on the role of the public library as a gateway to information, only on a much larger and more comprehensive scale. Providing such breadth of electronic access to so many published books will give Google an unparalleled view of people’s reading and information-seeking habits. By hosting the book search service and closely managing user access, Google will have the capability to collect data about individual users’ searches, preview pages visited, books purchased, and even time spent reading particular pages. Whereas in the offline world such data collection is either impossible or widely distributed among disconnected libraries and bookstores, Google will hold a massive centralized repository of books and of information about how people access and read books online. Furthermore, Google is likely to be the only comprehensive source for digitized out-of print books.

Google to remove all European books that are still commercially available

Online search giant Google said it will remove all European books that are still commercially available from a $125 million U.S. settlement with publishers to scan orphaned and out-of-print books in the US and sell them online.

The concessions come given the pressure from European authors and publishers, who don’t want the Google search engine to scan books by European authors, which are still protected by copyright, without asking their permission.

This fresh position means books that are no longer available to US consumers but are still on sale in Europe will not be included in Google’s scanned catalogues, unless of course the author expressly request inclusion.

Previously, European rights holders whose books were already out of print, or had never been published in the US were considered to have opted in to the settlement.

It’s a step in the right direction, [but] it’s not enough, what about South African authors?

To alleviate European concerns, Google has promised to have 2 non-U.S. representatives on the governing board of the Books Rights Registry, which is being set up to govern the settlement.

Google felt the need to clarify its European position following complaints, from German publishers who were concerned that their works were being illegally scanned in the US.

According to Google a lot of the European concerns had been already addressed in the US settlement and especially the emphasis on rights holder control should put minds at ease.

James Click, one of the authors who had initially sued Google in a class action suit said that the US. settlement was good for writers, as authors of out-of-print books “always retains total control” over the work and can through Google books create a market for a book which was already disregarded by the publishers.

Beyond worries about authors rights many Europeans worry that the US deal leaves them behind on a new way to reach readers.

“Copyright is now a barrier to a commercial and academic activity,” said Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, a lobby group championing civil liberties online. Europe is lagging behind the US which is a serious concern, he added.

Without a pan-European licensing model some European authors won’t get to benefit from the online push at all, Killock said.

Due to fragmented European copyright laws, a similar Europe wide publishing deal for orphan books would be impossible, the European Commission, Europe’s executive arm, concedes. Being aware of the problem it is currently driving for change in the laws to facilitate digitalization of books in Europe. Books are orphaned if they are still protected under copyright, but the rights holder is near impossible to identify.

Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding and Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said Europe needs to adapt its fragmented copyright legislation to create a legal framework which “paves the way for a rapid roll out of services, similar to those made possible in the U.S. by the recent settlement, to European consumers,” the commission said.

Orphan works and out-of-print works represent around 90% of European libraries’ collections. “These books must be recovered and given a new lease of life,” the commissioners said.

Amazon joins the fight against Google

In a strongly worded letter, Amazon.com added its voice to the growing chorus of cries urging a court to reject the proposed Google Books settlement.

The proposed agreement “creates a cartel of authors and publishers … operating with virtually no restrictions on its actions, with the potential to raise book prices and reduce output to the detriment of consumers and new authors or publishers who would compete with the cartel members,” said Amazon’s complaint, filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Google and a group of book publishers and authors came to an agreement about how to manage Google’s efforts to scan books and make them digitally available after the publishers sued the search giant for copyright infringement. The settlement proposal, reached last October, is under review by the court.

Amazon, which itself has scanned millions of books, argues that the settlement violates federal antitrust laws by establishing Google as the exclusive distributor of electronic copies of “orphan” works. Orphan books are those that are still in copyright but whose authors cannot be found.

“A court cannot approve a class action settlement that violates federal antitrust laws,” Amazon said in the letter. The settlement agreement proposes to set up a nonprofit Book Rights Registry, funded in part by Google, that would set the price for digital versions of orphan works as well as subscription rates for access to libraries of books.

The agreement does not preclude another company from setting up a similar arrangement, but detractors say it would be extremely difficult for another organization to strike the same type of deal with the publishing industry, so Google would be left with an effective monopoly over the digital copies of the books.

Other letters of opposition to the settlement appeared this week from the German government, the daughter of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, folk singer Arlo Guthrie, groups representing professional photographers and publishing houses in the Netherlands.

The settlement does have its supporters. European Commissioner Viviane Reding said she supports the settlement agreement, as has e-book developer Sony.

The court is accepting objections to the proposed settlement through Oct. 8.

The Google Book Settlement – impact on South African Publishers

The Google Book Settlement – impact on South African Publishers – by Bertus Preller

Background

The opt-out deadline for the Google class action “book copying” litigation is set for Friday, 4 September 2009. Many objections have been filed to the settlement and the court will be requested to determine how and whether the settlement fairly treats book copyright owners, distributors and the public.  Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo also joined an alliance this week opposing the legal settlement which would allow Internet giant Google to digitize and sell millions of books. The three companies’ are among the members of the Open Book Alliance which expressed concern about “serious legal, competitive, and policy issues” surrounding Google’s book scanning project.

What is the Google class action settlement all about?

The Google book settlement is the result of a class action which was filed in 2005 against Google in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Authors Guild of America v. Google Inc., No. 05 CV 8136 (JES) (S.D.N.Y.), as well as a related case filed by five publishers, The McGraw-Hill Cos. v. Google Inc., No. 05 CV 8881 (JES) (S.D.N.Y.).  The cases were born out of the Google Library Project, announced by Google in 2004, pursuant to which Google entered into agreements with a number of libraries to digitize books in there collections. The plaintiff authors and publishers sued Google for copyright infringement based on the reproduction, distribution, and display of their works digitized through the Library Project and used by Google without authorization.  Google has sought to defend its actions as fair use.  The court did not rule on any issue of liability or Google’s fair use defence before the settlement was reached.

Concerns have been voiced by some about whether the settlement gives Google too much market power; the administrative burdens and costs imposed on authors and publishers to claim books and maintain up-to-date rights information; the impact of the settlement on traditional contractual relationships between authors and publishers; the treatment of unclaimed (or “orphan”) works under the settlement; the resolution of non-U.S. authors’ and publishers’ claims through the class action mechanism (which is unknown in other countries); and the sheer complexity of the settlement.

In response to the lawsuit Google entered into a tentative interim settlement agreement by which Google proposed to pay more than $125 million on future royalties into a Books Rights Registry (BRR) to be distributed to the rights holders pursuant to a formula. In exchange, Google will obtain the right to digitize and make millions of books available online. Rights owners have until 4 September 2009 to “opt out” of the proposed settlement. The New York court hearing on the fairness or otherwise of the settlement is set for 7 October 2009.

The settlement agreement, consisting of more than 300 pages, is the parties’ proposal as to how the court action will be settled. In the US it is possible for private parties to enter into a settlement that not only affects them but which also binds non-parties who are certified by the Court to be affected in the same way. So, in this case, a New York Court will be asked to approve the settlement, not just with respect to the parties, but with respect to all authors and publishers who are said to fall within the class (made up of the authors sub-class and the publishers sub-class). In the US, once approved, the settlement will therefore means that unless an author or publisher has reserved their rights by formally opting out of the settlement, they will not be able to make any claim that Google is infringing copyright in their books.

Why should we bother in South Africa?

The question to be asked is why is it possible for a US class action settlement to affect or have a bearing on the copyright of a publisher in South Africa. Without going into the detail, the Berne Convention of 1886 extends the settlement to non-US authors and publishers. As a signatory to the Berne Convention, the US is required to afford rights holders from other Berne Convention countries the same copyright protection that it affords its own. Since South Africa is also a signatory to the Convention, the settlement is therefore also applicable to South African authors and publishers. Although a little more complicated than that, the important aspect to be aware of is that the settlement applies to South African authors and publishers, not because they have published in the US but simply because they have published a book to which the settlement applies, anywhere (including solely in South Africa).

If the settlement is allowed to go through it will affect the rights in all books published on or before 5 January 2009 in any country that is a signatory to the Berne Convention.

Berne Convention 5.1: “Authors shall enjoy, in respect of works for which they are protected under this Convention, in countries of the Union other than the country of origin, the rights which their respective laws do now or may hereafter grant to their nationals, as well as the rights specially granted by this Convention.”

What it means to South African authors and publishers?

It basically means that unless you formally opt out of the settlement, or you formally opt in but request Google not to digitize and/or display your books, Google will have the nonexclusive right to digitize any of your books that were published anywhere before 5 January 2009, whether they digitized them already or not. Google will then be entitled to display portions or substantial previews of the books via its Google book search internet site.

The settlement focuses on US publication. So, if your book is still generally available for purchase in the US, then Google will only be able to display part of that book with the consent of the author and publisher. (If the publisher wishes to allow Google to display excerpts, it must notify the author, who then has 30 days to agree or not). However, if your book is not generally available for sale in the US, then it is considered out of print and Google can display excerpts without needing any consent.

Google is also granted other rights such as the right to sell advertising alongside search results, to sell subscriptions to entire books to partner institutions (libraries etc) and to publish bibliographical material.  It is only books (including inserts) that are covered and not photographs or other images in the book. “Inserts” are essentially works included within Books (or in public domain or government works) that are separately copyrighted and owned, such as forwards, afterwards, essays, poems, lyrics, quotations, tables, charts, graphs, and children’s book illustrations.

What are the publisher’s (Rights holder’s) options?

THE PUBLISHERS has 4 options:

1                     Negotiate a separate deal with Google under its partner programme. If you have already, the Partner Programme agreement will take precedence although it may or may not cover all the rights that Google gets under the settlement agreement.

2                     Opt out by formally notifying Google. The deadline for opting out is 4 September 2009.

3                     Opt in. If you opt in and lodge a claim in respect of a book prior to 5 January 2010, you will receive a share of the $45 million that Google has put aside to pay rights holders (the exact amount will depend on how many people claim but will be between US$60 and US$300). You will also receive 63% of any revenue received by Google (e.g. from advertising around your book search result or if it is made available on subscription to a library or other institution).

4                     Do nothing – in which case you will lose the right to sue Google in the US even if Google does digitize your book and publish excerpts and you will not receive any revenue for that use.

There are a number of other dates which are important, but the main thing now is for a publisher whose rights will be affected, is to decide which of the 4 options to adopt. Then, if opt in is chosen, a further decision needs to be taken as to what books to claim, remove (totally), or exclude (e.g., to restrict display) from Google’s database.

What this means

The decision whether or not to opt out of the Google settlement is significant for at least these two reasons and perhaps more, depending on the nature of the author or publisher’s rights. The Google settlement has been viewed very positively by some commentators for creating an opportunity to easily distribute large amounts of previously published knowledge at modest cost. This is particularly true for out-of-print publications and orphan works (copyrighted works without an apparent owner). The settlement has been criticized by some for its anti-trust effects and for potentially interfering with the exclusive distribution rights of a copyright owner. Care should be taken by both publisher and an author and an author’s heirs in considering the impact of opting out. Failure to opt out by September 4th means that an author and publisher are included in the class action settlement.

So what to do?

If a publisher opts out, Google can use all of the publisher’s Books, as Google sees fit unless and until the publisher brings a copyright infringement suit resulting in a victory or in a settlement with Google that provides otherwise. This seems, on the face of it, an excessively mistrustful view. In the past, Google has never claimed the right to use copyrighted works ‘as [it] sees fit’, but only to the extent permitted under its (admittedly broad and disputed) interpretation of ‘fair use’.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/help/bin/answer.py?answer=118704#q18a

http://seekingalpha.com/user/293236/comment/299883

http://www.publishers.org.uk/download.cfm?docid=4A07F799-400E-41CA-980B103898782A4B

Benefits of Opting In

The Settlement Fund

Under the settlement Google will make a payment of $45 million into the Book Rights Registry. It is guaranteeing minimum payments of $60 dollars for a book $15 for an ‘insert’ and $5 for a ‘partial insert. If enough rights-holders register that more money is required, Google has promised to provide the necessary additional funds.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

The sums that are promised are risible, far smaller than are normally payable for copyright licences. This is hardly fair payment; a pacifier for the desperate and the resigned. By comparison, the lawyers who negotiated the deal on behalf of the Authors’ Guild will receive, if the settlement goes through, a payment of $30 million. This fee will be paid by Google within ten business days of the court’s approval of the settlement.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf ;

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Attachment-I-Notice-of-Class-Action-Settlement.pdf

For a comment see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-9MjgAheHg

http://www.slideshare.net/naypinya/reflections-on-the-google-book-search-settlement-by-pamelasamuelson

(a)     Only if a book is out of print and the rights have reverted to the author will the author receive the full payment. If the book is still in print, the payment will be remitted to the publisher. It appears that this will apply regardless of whether the author has licensed the electronic rights and/or the US rights to the publisher. The publisher will pay to the author ‘the appropriate splits or royalties as may be specified in the author-publisher contract for the Book or as the parties may otherwise agree’. Of course, no existing contract will make specific provision for a payment from the Google Book Settlement Fund. It may provide for electronic rights in some shape or form, but there may well be room for argument over how the one-off payment from Google relates to the precise terms of the contract. And in other cases it will simply come down to ‘as the parties may … agree’. Whatever the author receives, it will not be the full amount.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en-gb/Attachment-A-Author-Publisher-Procedures.pdf

(b)     In the case of out-of-print books where the rights have not reverted to the author, a share will be paid to the publisher, on a fixed basis. For books with a publication date before 1987, the Registry will pay 65% of the revenues to the author and 35% to the publisher. In the case of books published during or after 1987, the split will be fifty-fifty.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en-gb/Attachment-A-Author-Publisher-Procedures.pdf

No regard is paid to the question of who actually owns the electronic rights to the work, or the US rights either. In the case of nearly all works published before 1987 and many that have appeared since, the electronic rights will not have been licensed to the publisher. Similarly, in the case of many books that have never been published in the USA, the US rights may also not have been licensed to any publisher. In such cases the Google Book Settlement Agreement is effectively making a bid to supersede and rewrite existing contracts: assigning to publishers rights that they did not previously possess and revenues that they otherwise would not receive. This is a very disturbing feature of the settlement agreement.

See:

http://graysonagency.com/blog/publishing/the-google-settlement/

(c) It may be noted that not all authors of ‘inserts’ will receive a payment from the settlement fund. In order to claim for an ‘insert’ a claimant will have to state that they ‘did not give permission for online use of the Insert as part of the work in which the Insert appears, or …if such permission was granted, it was no longer in effect on or after June 1, 2003’. Otherwise, it would appear that they cannot make a claim.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

(d)     The initial sum of $45 million that Google has put on the table is wildly insufficient to pay all the rights-holders of all the in-copyright works it has digitised, even at the low figures specified in the settlement.

Google is making a giant bet that most of the rights-holders affected by the settlement will never find out that their rights are being exploited and put in a claim for payment.

See:

http://kernochancenter.org/Googlebookssettlementrecording.htm http://media.law.columbia.edu/kernochan/kernochangoogle090313tape2t.html

It may reasonably be assumed that, among those rights-holders who remain in ignorance of the settlement and the benefits that are promised from registering their works, a very large number, probably a majority will be foreign authors and their heirs and assigns.

See:

http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2009/04/google-book-settlement-orphan-works-and-foreignworks.Html

http://fictioncircus.com/grimmelmann.php

(e)     No money will be paid to rights-holders out of the Settlement Fund until at least a year after the settlement is approved by the court; and even with this provision written into the agreement, Google has thought it prudent to warn visitors to the Book Search Settlement website that payments will not come promptly.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en-gb/Attachment-A-Author-Publisher-Procedures.pdf ; http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/help/bin/answer.py?answer=118704#q38

Google’s Plans for Making Money

1              Google has a number of plans for commercially exploiting the huge and still-growing corpus of digitised books it controls; it plans to run advertising alongside search results and online page views. It also plans to sell subscriptions to the whole corpus (or parts of it) to libraries. It plans to sell individual consumers the right to read books or parts of books online and print out pages. Other uses it envisages for the future include selling e-books, in the form of downloadable PDF files, selling Print on Demand copies, and offering custom compilations of pages and portions of books as course materials for the education and training markets. It cannot be thought an irrelevance that on 2 June 2009 Google announced that it had plans to facilitate the sale of e-books by publishers in its Partner Programme.

See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/technology/internet/01google.html

2              In order to avoid being legally challenged under foreign copyright laws, Google plans (for the present) to confine these activities to the US market.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

3          Under the settlement Google has promised to pay an initial $34.5 million dollars to establish a Book Rights Registry. This is to be a not-for-profit entity charged with representing the interests of rights-holders in connection with the Google Book Settlement.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Final-Notice-of-Class-Action-Settlement.pdf

Google also promises to pass on to this Registry 63% of the revenues it receives from commercially exploiting the corpus of digitised books. The figure of 63% is arrived at by allocating a nominal 70% to the rights-holders, and then slicing off 10% of this figure to cover Google’s ‘operating costs’. It may be noted that under the standard arrangements of traditional book publishing the author is paid his or her agreed due and the publisher aims to make a profit out of the income that remains.

The procedure laid down in the settlement agreement reverses this principle:

Google will take its substantial (37%) slice off the top of the revenues earned by the books before any money flows by way of the Registry to the registered rights-holders. The continuing costs of running the Registry are to be funded by taking a percentage of the revenues passed on by Google before what is left is divided among those rights-holders who have successfully registered a claim. An attachment to the settlement agreement estimates that the percentage withheld by the Registry for running costs will be between 10% and 20% of what it receives from Google. It should be noted that this is an estimate only, and does not bind the Registry’s directors.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Attachment-I-Notice-of-Class-Action-Settlement.pdf

Rights-holders, then, should expect to receive at most about 53% of any income earned by the use of their works. If the Registry turns out to be expensive to operate, they may receive a great deal less.

4          Under the settlement Google proposes to deal with works differently depending on whether or not they are defined as ‘commercially available’ according to the terms of the agreement. The agreement defines a book as commercially available at a given point if the rights holder or his or her licensee were offering it for sale new in the United States ‘through one or more then-customary channels of trade’. In that case Google will classify the book as ‘in print’ and will not make any ‘display uses’ of it, such as providing previews to searchers, including it in institutional subscriptions, or allowing consumer purchase of online access. The definition of ‘commercially available’ has caused alarm among foreign publishers, since it seemed to imply that books in print but not published or directly distributed in the US would be made available by Google to searchers (in preview) and customers (for online access), unless and until the rights-holders registered the works at issue with the Book Rights Registry and changed the settings, or applied to have them completely removed from the book corpus. However, following consultation with the lawyers who negotiated the settlement on behalf of the AAP, the Publishers Association of the UK has reported that Google plans to classify any book as commercially available if it can be purchased new from within the US through a website.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

http://www.publishers.org.uk/download.cfm?docid=4A07F799-400E-41CA-980B103898782A4B http://www.copyright.com/media/pdfs/Healyinterview.pdf

If Google were to make a mistake in determining whether a book is available in the US, the agreement lays down one “sole remedy” Google must correct the mistake within 30 days. A lot of damage might be done to the value of a copyright in 30 days. It is, however, open to the rights-holder to be proactive and direct Google or the Registry to exclude a book, or part of it, from online display or commercial exploitation.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

5          In the case of books deemed to be in print, any revenue will be remitted to the publisher who will pay the author some kind of royalty, as described above under “The Settlement Fund”.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en-gb/Attachment-A-Author-Publisher-Procedures.pdf

6          Any revenue that flows to registered rights-holders through the Book Rights Registry from the commercial exploitation by Google of books that it does not deem commercially available (and that have not been excluded from such use by the rights-holder) is to be distributed along the same principles as the payments from the Settlement Fund: see above, The Settlement Fund, 2 (b).

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en-gb/Attachment-A-Author-Publisher-Procedures.pdf

7          For works that are included in the corpus of books offered for institutional subscription, an ‘inclusion fee’ is to be paid, in addition to fees based on the usage of individual books and ‘inserts’. The inclusion fee is to be ‘targeted at… $200 per Book’. By ‘targeted at’ is meant that this is the figure aimed at, depending on sales of subscriptions. It may not be reached, or it may be exceeded. In any case, it will not be payable to rights-holders until ten years after the first payments for institutional subscriptions are made by Google to the Registry. Once an inclusion fee has been paid, the rights-holder will not be able to exclude the work from use in the institutional subscription corpus unless they repay the inclusion fee, or share of the fee, that they have previously received for the work. The revenue from inclusion fees will be shared among the rights-holders according to the same principles which are applied to other revenue sources.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Attachment-C-Plan-of-Allocation.pdf

8          The settlement agreement lays out the default pricing arrangements in considerable detail. It is open to rights-holders to specify their own prices, which the agreement states that only they can change. However, Google reserves the right to offer ‘temporary discounts off the List Prices from time to time at its sole discretion’. The payment to the Registry will be at the list prices ‘unless otherwise agreed by Google and the Registry’: in other words, it is always open to Google and the Registry to agree to pass the cost of any discount on to the rights-holders.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

9          Under the agreement no payment will be made to the rights-holders for any revenue earned by Google from advertisements served on web pages containing search results. The undisputed right to serve advertisements next to the results of searches on the Book Search corpus is one of the major potential benefits to Google from the settlement agreement. At present no advertisements are served by Google on Book Search results, apparently out of concern that this would weaken its case for the ‘fair use’ of the books.

See:

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

Conclusion

My view is not to opt out of the settlement.

A publisher should start to claim all its locally originated titles via the settlement site.  One may well remove all ‘in print’ titles from the settlement and negotiate a separate partnership agreement to cover these (on better commercial terms than the settlement) and leave older titles (where the Publisher don’t have digital files etc.) in the settlement as the cost of digitising for the partner programme is unlikely to be justifiable and there are more complicated issues around ownership of digital rights for the partnership programme.

The settlement would dramatically impact copyright owners around the world, as it would give Google a license to use nearly every foreign book ever published, even books that have never been published in the United States. While Google could only sell and display those books to U.S. customers, many foreign owners are unaware of how their rights are being involuntarily licensed in the important US. market. Moreover, the deal would license Google to use the foreign book data to improve its dominant web search and advertising services that can and will be offered worldwide.

To simply control what Google is allowed to do with your book—including denying them any license at all the preferable option will be to stay in the class, register your book with the Book Rights Registry and then use the controls therein to specify what Google is allowed to do—including how much of your book they’re allowed to display online (nothing, a snippet as in a search result, a preview of a few pages, the full book); whether you want them to be able to sell it; and what price you want to charge (with the revenue split 63/37 rights holder/Google).

Unless a publisher is anxious to sue Google it makes far more sense to essentially do nothing, which means you’re part of the class, and then to decide how if at all you want your books to be displayed via this Google facility.

Important Dates

5 January 2009:

‘Notice Commencement Date’: the rights in virtually all works published on or before this date in book form will be affected by the settlement, unless the authors or rights-holders opt out.

4 September 2009:

‘Opt-Out Deadline’: deadline for opting out of the Google Book Settlement, or opting in and objecting to it. (This was originally 5 May, but was extended.)

7 October 2009:

Final Fairness Hearing by the court

5 January 2010:

Deadline for registering with the Book Rights Registry and claiming a share of the money Google Inc. is offering to rights-holders whose work was digitised without their permission on or before the opt-out deadline 4 September 2009. (Google does not plan to stop digitising on 4 September, but rights-holders will only be able to claim compensation for works that were digitised on or before that date.)

5 April 2011:

Deadline for rights-holders who do not opt out of the settlement but who wish to have their books removed from Google’s database. After that date, Google will only exclude their books from the database if they have not already been digitised. There is no final deadline for registering books or inserts. Rights-holders who do not opt out can register their works with the Book Rights Registry at any time.

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Settlement-Agreement.pdf

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/Final-Summary-Notice-of-Class-Action-Settlement.pdf

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/help/bin/answer.py?answer=118704#q0

http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/intl/en/Attachment-I-Notice-of-Class-Action-Settlement.pdf

A History of Future Publishing

In the world of digitized music, the iPod-Apple ecosystem occupies the luxury end of the consumer spectrum. Steve Jobs took the initiative early to guarantee uniformity, quality and sleek design for high-end consumers. Then, he began working assiduously on his back-list, making history when The Beatles songbook became available on iTunes.

Apple makes money on the device, and the songs. Apple’s control of the market is so obvious. Just as all photocopies are Xerox, a podcast is a podcast even if it’s recorded in MP3. As the competition drives innovation, Apple brings out newer, cutting edge models — like the nearly invisible, Nano Air — and makes more money. By not competing with its competitors, Apple avoids a race to the bottom line. It competitors cannot do this. Checkmate.

In the emerging world of e-Books, Kindle-Amazon will increasingly occupy a position similar to the iPod while Google (a collector and purveyor of e-Books) together with its partner Sony (a manufacturer of e-Readers) will forever be positioned at the lower end of the e-Book market along with several other manufacturers. This too, resembles the structure of the digitized music industries.

The Sony reader is less imaginative than the Kindle. It’s cheaper, uglier, less functional, less popular, and its ecosystem is not as fully developed. While it is true that other applications spread Googles’ inventory onto mobile devices, notice the vagueness of the term ‘mobile device’ itself. The Stanza, eReader and ‘iKindle’ applications are all add-ons for existing machines that have small screens and are mainly valued for other functions: phoning, messaging or mobile Internet connectivity. While electronics manufacturers constantly dream of designing, building and selling an all-in-one personal electronic doodad to 6 billion people, still no Swiss Army Knife will never replace a good corkscrew, a good screwdriver or a good pair of scissors.

Feature creep harms the quality of any tool, but, most important, it obscures a manufacturer’s ability to market it. The Kindle, on the other hand, is what you keep at home or take with you on vacation to relax into. It is for the book-lover who might occasionally buy a first, a signed or a special edition. It is lingerie. It is a box of chocolates or a bottle of double-malt. Especially well-timed for the recession as a luxury item that keeps on giving by allowing you to ’save’ on cheaper electronic editions, it’s now here to stay. Competition will drive it to adapt and compete, of course. That’s only natural. Stanza, for example, has many attractive features that Kindle now needs to copy. It will.

According to the current growth curve, electronic books will dominate world-wide book sales by 2018. (This is the book industry’s own prediction, and is extremely ’safe.’ It does not anticipate a watershed or ‘tipping point’). In any case, Kindle-Amazon and Google will continue to make good money. Traditional print media will continue to lose money as long as they stumble around wondering how to accommodate themselves to what happened yesterday.

In desperation, print news publishers will soon seize back their own material from Google, but Google does not have the financial problems of print news publishers. Its universe is mainly a young generation of screen readers who have little loyalty to Rupert Murdoch (much as I love him) or the Wall Street Journal. When its current news sources dry up, Google will join with online media sources and develop its own instant eReportage. Newspapers will continue to wither and die. Of course, the big winners will be the Taiwanese device makers themselves.

Freescale Semiconductor, for example, makes processors for many e-readers including the Kindle and Sony. Another Taiwanese eBook powerhouse is Netronix, a contract device manufacturer, partly owned by display-maker Prime View International (PVI). A conglomerate of print publishers could probably still guarantee themselves survival and success by investing heavily in the manufacturing-end of ePublishing. But this presents enormous logistical challenges. A entire generation of news and publishing executives would have to reeducate themselves and then work out a massive compromise. The Klingons would have to join the Federation and then buy out the Borg. I do not anticipate this happening.

Netronix now owns the worldwide patents for e-ink/e-paper. They manufacture several models of an eReader called Mentor in much the same way that Sandisk (and many others) make good, usable MP3 players that nonetheless do not compete with Apple’s iPod. In the future, no matter which brand of e-Reader you choose, your device will undoubtedly contain many components manufactured by PVI-Netronix as well as a processor made by Freescale.

What I am eager to see, however, is not the dominance of any one format, device or publisher, but a qualitative change in the actual use of the technology. From the history of technology we know that early on, every device or tool imitates the technology it replaces. The earliest pottery has beautiful geometric designs that are derived from patterns of the woven baskets that pottery supplemented and replaced. The creation of early movies too, was described by its practitioners as a ‘camera-stylo’ [a fluid camera-pen] which made writing a model for a bold new technology that quickly surpassed the printed word.

What I want to see is an e-Book that is no longer a simulacrum of a printed work. Soon, when people begin writing exclusively for eBooks, book metaphors like pagination will lose their functionality and fall away. But I also want the new medium to develop brand new possibilities. Maybe then, we will stop calling them e-Books and simply call them ‘eebs.’

The Kindle feature of reading itself aloud is a good beginning in expanding this new medium. In the future, I foresee hyperlinks that will break the reader out of the printed page and take him or her on a roller-coaster ride across the Internet during an accelerated and compressed ‘knowledge-journey’ [nahjer?] that would be impossible in a printed work. I don’t know how long this will take, but I know it has to come.

Taken from an article by Giles Slade

The Way The iPhone is Shaping Social media

There are some incredible infographics given lately at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference WWDC 2009 – it showed the “live” download of the top 20,000 apps from iTunes App store. It generated a lot of buzz.

What’s really interesting is what it represents:

• There are now 50,000 + iPhone (and iPod Touch, so iPhone OS) applications less than a year since release of iPhone 3G.
• The displays are representing 20,000 of the most downloaded applications
• More than 1 billion apps downloaded, the milestone was reached in April 2009, again less than a year since iPhone 3G.
• 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute.
• New iPhone 3G S is faster, with video capabilities & even edit your video on the phone and share it straight to YouTube.

There simply is no iPhone killer, Android, Blackberry and various Palm and Windows OS devices don’t come close. During the first quarter of iPhone 3G availability ended September 27, 2008, 6.9 million units were sold, exceeding the 6.1 million first-generation iPhone units sold in the prior five quarters combined. Unit sales of iPhone 3G continued to be significant in the quarter ended March 28, 2009, with 3.79 million iPhones sold.

iPhones are shaping social media in a big way:

Twitter

Twitter use increased thousandfold after getting iPhone Twitter apps and enjoying the experience of social on the go.

Facebook

The iPhone Facebook app was the number one free app downloaded in 2008 on the iTunes store. There are currently more than 8.6 million active monthly users of the iPhone Facebook application worldwide.

Flickr

The iPhone is the second most popular after a”real” digital SLR cameras Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. It’s outstripped 3 other popular digital SLRs since its launch. Read: pro-sumer digital SLR photographers and iPhone users are the most prolific sharers on Flickr.

YouTube

From early 2008, iPhone users were 30 times more likely to access YouTube compared to regular mobile web users. From 2009, it jumps to 37% of iPhone users watched online video, but the rest of mobile world has caught up, (iPhone users 6x more likely to watch video compared to regular mobile users). The prediction is that an explosion of YouTube videos being filmed edited and uploaded from new iPhone 3G S are going to happen.

MySpace

The MySpace iPhone app is number 5 of the social networking free apps on the Australian iTunes store. AdMob metrics from April 2009 gives us the perspective of how much iPhone punches above its weight.

AdMob report shows iPhone OS had 8% of smartphone market share globally, but generated 43% of mobile web requests and 65% of HTML usage. That’s 8% of iPhones generating 65% of mobile web traffic. Nielsen says 88% of iPhone users in the US are regular users of the web (making them 4x as likely as the typical subscriber) Mobile advertising Ogilvy blogs reported that iPhone users are 23% more likely to respond to mobile advertising. Looking at the stats for mobile web traffic, it makes sense given the amount of mobile web traffic generated from iPhone OS. Its a pretty compelling story of how iPhone OS feeds users and content to major social media and social networking sites, and helps keep users connected, anywhere 3G access is available.

The iPhone is king of smartphones .

The iPhone is king, smartphones are the new laptops, and iPhone applications can and do make money.

A new industry report from mobile analytics firm Flurry reveals some unique insights into the smartphone industry as of right now. So what can we learn from this industry report? Anything surprising? Actually, what the report confirms is what we’ve been hearing for some time now: the iPhone is king, smartphones are the new laptops, and iPhone applications can and do make money.

iPhone Has a Commanding Lead

The most surprising about the report isn’t simply how prevalent and popular the iPhone and iPhone applications are today, but how far ahead they are of the nearest competitors. From an application perspective, the iPhone is killing on all fronts: number of developers, number of applications, and number of consumers using these applications, Apple just know how to do it, Blackberry doesn’t. iPhones are for mobile phone manufacturers what Facebook is for social networks, simply in a league of their own.

Keep in mind when viewing these numbers, we’re looking at data, a snapshot sample computed from 100 applications, 8 million consumers, and 4 platforms (Apple iPhone, Google Android, RIM Blackberry, and JavaME). While these charts can give you insight into the mobile trends, they can’t necessarily be extrapolated to the entire mobile smartphone industry. For example, because the report only deals with a small number of Blackberry developers, they can’t provide any statistically relevant numbers relating to Blackberry apps. But then again why haven’t Blackberry developers signed up for analytics?

What you can glean from the info they’ve gathered, however, is that iPhone has a commanding lead over Android and the others right now. Unless Google has some big tricks up their sleeve, catching up with Apple’s iPhone is going to be very very tough.

Smartphones are the New Laptops

Smartphones are the new laptops – we sort of knew this one already, didn’t we? Although historically, only 10% of the installed-base used mobile applications on a daily basis, today, that number is changing… and changing fast. Smartphone applications are now heavily used and many are even used daily. Among those used daily, the frequency of use is also high, with some applications being used as much as 20 times per day.

Are smartphones really replacing laptops and are applications really replacing web sites? Maybe “replace” isn’t exactly the right word to use, but there is definitely a shift in user behavior occurring right now where people are using their smartphones more than ever.

Yes, iPhone Apps Make Money

According to the report, iPhone applications can and do make money. Not all apps make it, of course, but those that do can actually make good money. A strong publisher with two titles a month can expect $10 million to $15 million in sales through the iPhone channel, if the titles are well-marketed, says the report.

But “well-marketed” is the key word here. The iPhone app industry is beginning to resemble the music industry with its “hit-driven” nature. One “hit” gets a developer on the map and gives them the chance to sell more apps. Successful apps often resemble successful songs: you need a good artist, a good producer, a strong distributor, and plenty of promotion.

Boosting Sales in a “Hit-Driven” Economy

It’s also worth noting that you can’t live forever off one “hit” alone. With iPhone games especially, users tend to get bored rather quickly. Flurry estimates that the average lifetime for a game is about 3 months. Publishers should keep that in mind when planning for their refresh cycles and updates.

But even still, refreshes provided by updates may not be enough. Flurry is seeing a trend that, to be honest, was surprising: only 10% of users are updating their applications after download. That means new features pushed out via an update aren’t being seen by a large group of the app’s users.

Instead of trying to drive engagement of your current user base through updates, it seems you may be better off going after new users. Cross-promotion of applications – that is, advertising one app within your other app – is very effective. Giving away a free trial can boost sales of your paid application, too.

Will Students Carry Books In Future?

A look into the future

The Future of Books

A student makes the traditional pilgrimage to the campus bookstore with a new class schedule in hand. In previous semesters, she would have snaked through long, winding lines to buy used, highlighted, dog-eared textbooks. This time, however, she logs on at one of a dozen computer kiosks, enters her authorization number, slides a debit card through a machine, and leaves the bookstore with a very different set of readings. Besides one traditional textbook (price, $65), she also leaves with two customized printed books. One consists of a few chapters from several standard textbooks (the book smells “fresh” because it was printed the night before). It cost only $27. The other customized book comprises a chapter from a traditional textbook, two case studies from various professors, and a white paper written by the professor teaching the course. This book cost about $20. In addition to these paper documents, she also picked up at the bookstore a customized CD simply marked “English Literature of the 18th Century” and two 3×5 index cards on which are printed URLs for campus Web sites-one suggesting materials stored in the digital library on campus, and the other directing her to supplementary materials available only on the campus bookstore Web site. Back in her dorm room, the student connects to the Internet and finds an email from the bookstore waiting for her. Following links within the e-mail, she downloads the electronic version of the physical textbook that she just bought for $65. She sees that electronic versions of her two new customized books are available for just $2.50 and $10 respectively; she downloads these to her laptop as well. She visits the Web addresses listed on her 3×5 index cards and selects some of the additional materials available there. Most of these ancillary materials are free but “protected” (though she notes that for students at other institutions, there is a $3.50 charge). Finally, while she is organizing her new digital textbooks using software on her laptop, the student receives another e-mail. This time, the message contains an attachment from her chemistry professor, who, with one mouse click, has sent a sixty-five-page digital course pack and supplemental reading materials to a class of 150 students. The total cost of all these paper and electronic materials is roughly 30 percent less than what she would have paid for the same course materials just a semester before, almost all are accessible both electronically and in print, and most impressively, she now has room in her backpack for something besides books and study guides. In the near future, this student may carry a single handheld device containing all the materials she needs for all her classes, not to mention a full complement of relevant reference materials. She will download and interact with these materials by using software that allows her to bookmark and annotate content, conduct quick searches, and look up words in an integrated dictionary that can read words and phrases back to her in synthetic speech. She will connect wirelessly to the Internet from links within her electronic materials. Of course, she will be able to print portions of her digital course books (if authored and published by campus faculty members) anytime she likes. New electronic reading material for her sequence courses will contain links back to the electronic content from previous semesters, still stored on her reading device, for quick review and reference. She will also experience a richer learning experience made possible by embedded audio, video, three-dimensional animation, and tools for collaborative learning. This is not a new vision. Educators and visionaries have been imagining the ultimate learning hardware and software for some time, presenting even more futuristic scenarios (notable examples being Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “Memex”1 and Alan Kay’s “Dynabook” from thirty years ago). But neither is this a scene from a futuristic novel. Electronic reading materials-”eBooks”-are real today, and many other elements of the vision are only months away. Digital learning content is about to overtake the education marketplace and change the way we distribute and interact with information.