Another Related Copyright Post
March 16th, 2005 | by Todd W |Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Follow Mr Colman’s recipe
A few months ago I agreed to be interviewed by an acquaintance for an article about a concept called Bookcrossing. The article appeared in a local magazine here in Kalamazoo, and I happened to see the published version today. Unfortunately, I can’t link to it, and I don’t have the right to scan and post, but later I may excerpt my own words for the blog.
I checked the Bookcrossing site to see if the article may be mentioned in their publicity section, and instead I happened to find this speech by Caroline Michel, the publisher of Harper Collins. It seems that my concerns aren’t unique.
The music industry claims that they barely break even on the delivery of digital music, but this probably only means that they don’t yet make as much as they would like. There are potential lessons here for the publishing business.
Two months ago Google announced that it was going to scan and put online all the books in the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, Michigan and Oxford universities as well as those of the New York Public Library. This will obviously affect the sale of out-of-copyright books, though to what extent will not be clear for some time.
Meanwhile, Amazon are soon to launch their “search inside the book” tool in the UK, which will allow you to search millions of pages to find the exact book you want to buy. Google Print are offering a similar service, putting the content of books where you can find it most easily: right in the Google search results. These and other developments will at the very least make the practice of reading books off a screen, rather than a page, more familiar, thereby more acceptable and eventually, more frequent.
One possible outcome is that publishers in the not too distant future will sell books in digital form direct to consumers. At HarperCollins in America we already share advance reading copies online with consumers under a marketing initiative launched two years ago which we call First Look.
And book publishing as a whole has its very own potential Napster crisis in the growing practice of book crossing: books passed from reader to reader and tracked and organised on bookcrossing.com.
The entire speech is worth a few minutes of time.
To be fair, Bookcrossing has their own thread to respond to her concerns. The defense seems to center on the ‘victim benefit’ argument of my previous post: unauthorized swapping and uncompensated reading actually sells more books. That may be true, but it still isn’t your decision to make on behalf of the author. Moral issues can’t be waived away so easily.
