In the latest salvo in the fight over the future of books on the Internet, one of the country's biggest publishers said it intends to produce digital copies of its books and then make them available to search services offered by such companies as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com., while maintaining physical possession of the digital files....HarperCollins Publishers Inc. hopes to head off the prospect of these big Internet companies taking charge of books that it has purchased, edited and published.
Its move to digitize its active backlist of an estimated 20,000 titles and as many as 3,500 new books each year comes at a moment when technology companies and the publishing industry are wrestling over rights and economic models for books online. HarperCollins's effort to make search companies use its digital copies is an aggressive response to anxieties felt by publishers worried that they will lose control over their intellectual property. Along with a recent initiative by Bertelsmann AG's Random House, the initiative signals a growing desire by publishers to control and participate in some of the new online uses of their books.
"Now is the time to build a digital infrastructure that will allow us to protect our rights and the rights of our authors," said Jane Friedman, chief executive of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers. "We will make all of our books available digitally, but we will store the digital copies and license them out to those who want to use them."
"We didn't like being seen as Luddites," she added. "We see what's going on, and we get it. We want to be the best collaborator, but we also want to take charge of our future."..."The difference is that the digital files will be on our servers," said Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins Publishers. "The search companies will be allowed to come, crawl our Web site, and create an index that they can take away, but not the image of the page."
This would prevent such Internet companies from selling a digital copy of that book unless HarperCollins decided to partner with them as a retailer....Publishers were willing to give Amazon thousands of titles to digitize for Amazon's search-inside this-book feature. Ms. Friedman says this helped boost her backlist sales by 6% to 8% annually. However, Ms. Friedman says she was caught off-guard by the Amazon Upgrade program, which hasn't yet gone into effect.
"This raised issues about how to monetize the digital files," Ms. Friedman said. "Is ownership physical possession, or is ownership defined by intellectual property? Amazon had our digital copies, and they had the customers. But as publishers we want to set the price and terms for our products."
Comment. This isn't about OA, but I blog it because HarperCollins is showing that it accepts the evidence that free online full-text searching sells books. It's happy to let Google and Amazon do the indexing, provided that they have no way to sell the texts themselves. If HarperCollins can persuade other book publishers that they will gain from online indexing, then we're likely to see more book scanning and less resistance. Who conducts the scans and owns the files is a detail.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/13/2005 11:08:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
