Open Access News

[T]he biggest event for books during the [Frankfurt Book Fair] was the alignment of camps in the fight over Google Print. American publishers are suiting up for a fight on copyright issues, while German publishers seem to be more wiling to let Google be Google and to get on with building stronger online presences for searching and consuming books. Given the history of other recent wars on copying premium content guess who's likely to be the richer of these two camps in a few years' time? It's time for all publishers to embrace fair use of book content for searching and to focus on how they're going to make money in a search-enabled world....In the broader picture the suits against Google are largely moot. Book publishers have tarried far too long with old models and channels while online technology has bloomed all around them. The intelligent response to that technology is to embrace it aggressively and to recognize that both publishers and authors of books will benefit from the widest access possible to the most affluent and content-hungry audience available - the online audience. That access requires a willingness to place content in the best available channels, including search engines, so that it meets an audience's interests and needs when the moment and context is right. Anything less will be commercially self-defeating....Lesson learned [from the file-sharing wars in music]: effective and legal searching is content's best friend. Corollary lesson: enabling users to help other users find content is one of the most effective marketing methods available....[Google's] display of copyrighted materials seems in general to fall squarely into "fair use" territory. As we noted in our earlier news analysis on copyright the notion of copyright in a digital era has less to do with restricting electronic reproduction than it does with being able to define what's done with a digital object once it's been replicated. Focus on the rights, not the copy....There may be some important points to clarify in the application of copyright law in the digital age that will benefit from a judge's input, but if those clarifications stifle effective search engines then it will be to the detriment of all publishers....It was naive for book publishers to think that their "Google moment" would come on their own terms at their own pace. This may be in part because of the success and sophistication of Amazon.com as an online retail presence that had sheltered booksellers from the wider search and content consumption environment. But the days of central online storefronts as the primary vehicles for locating and consuming content are dwindling. In their place is an evolving commercial environment in which monetization follows the distribution of digital objects rather than distribution following monetization.