Tech review maven Walter Mossberg

In observation of Read An E-Book Week, DriveThruRPG and White Wolf are offering a free watermarked-PDF download of the 224-page World of Darkness rulebook (list price $24.99) for as long as the week lasts. Enjoy!

A recent survey shows that 90% of academic publishers have seen a growth in e-book sales over the last two years. E-book sales now make up almost 10% of total e-book sales in those markets—twice the level of e-book sales in general. Academic publishers have apparently been much quicker to adapt to the e-book market than trade presses.

The survey found that academic publishers were also relatively unconcerned about the various challenges presented by the shift towards digital books. Although piracy was one of the biggest concerns, [report co-author Laura] Cox said very few publishers thought of it as a serious problem.

It appears the next smartphone platform to receive a Kindle reader will be Android. jkOnTheRun reports on an Engadget posting of leaked documents from Dell stating that the Dell Streak (aka Mini 5), an Android device, will include a Kindle reader application (as well as several other Amazon services).

Sony is bringing more newspaper and magazine content to its e-book store. Probably in a bid to strengthen its position before the iPad arrives, ReadWriteWeb reports, it is adding 20 new papers and magazines, including the New York Times and Boston Globe. (Sony press release here.)

Google is slowly conquering Europe. Or at least Europe’s great libraries. Even as its Google Books program has proven as controversial east of the Atlantic as west of it, it continues to make deals with European libraries to digitize their collections. The Guardian reports that Google is going to be working together with Italian libraries and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage to digitize “up to a million out-of-copyright works”. There is no word on whether this includes any still-in-copyright works as well.

Oddly enough, it happened only a couple of weeks after Google executives received suspended sentences over a controversial YouTube video. Hmm.

TeleRead founder David Rothman sets down his opinions on the decline of newspapers in favor of the web on his Solomon Scandals blog. He feels that “the real newspaper-killer” is online papers’ lack of interactivity and community.

Speaking of which, here is an excellent argument in favor of saving newspapers, found via Adam Tinworth’s blog:

As Erik Sherman’s article on BNET notes, there are considerable technical hurdles to doing this (which is what the patent itself is trying to address), but perhaps more challenging are the legal hurdles.

The Tasini case (which TeleRead mentioned here and here), in which freelance writers sued over their articles’ inclusion in a database, established that permission for article publication in print did not cover further uses such as syndication and database rights.

Of course, since that time publishers have simply added those rights to their standard contracts—and many freelance writers may not necessarily have registered the copyright for their older articles giving them little legal standing to sue.

Reback explains why book search was so appealing to Google: it has to do with satisfying searches in the “long tail” of search subjects that are not the “popular” subjects that make up the majority of Google search queries. Apparently studies have shown these “tail” searches can influence consumers’ decision as to which search engine to use for all their searching.

Google believes that books contain the answers for many of those “tail” searches—and if they can lock in access to the book search database and lock competitors out, they can gain a significant competitive advantage. This, Reback says, is exactly what the terms of the proposed settlement will allow them to do.

The latest hearing on Google Books will take place today. Needless to say, plenty of people will be watching.

Google reiterates arguments Google has already made in favor of the settlement, and responds to Justice Department objections by citing legal precedents in its favor.

The eventual fate of Google’s settlement is still up in the air, though the upcoming hearing should provide some hints as to its possible future. Given that most of the objectors were not swayed by Google’s revision—even the Justice Department, whose objections the revision was most intended to address—Google and the Authors Guild could be in for an uphill battle.

Publishers are reporting that after the Amazon and Apple deals, Google has had to take a more flexible tone and relent on printing and cut and paste.

(More from the New York Times.)

Sarno writes:

The Justice Department cited issues with copyright and judicial process in its reservations about the settlement. Though it complimented the parties on the progress of the latest draft of the settlement, the brief said that the agreement was still "an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court."

The next hearing on the settlement will take place on February 18th.

University Librarian Michael A. Keller said, "We are highly supportive of the amended settlement, which offers an enormous public good, making the full text of millions of books available to the American public."

Provost John Etchemendy signed the agreement for Stanford University. "This agreement is consistent with Stanford’s mission of sharing and disseminating knowledge, and allows us to expand our participation by sharing more works from our library," Etchemendy said. "We support the efforts to make books more broadly available to the American public and to all of higher education."

Much of the release is the same sort of feel-good rhetoric—it is a press release, after all, and those tend to spin things in the rosiest way possible. Essentially, all it really means is that Stanford has expanded its pre-existing partnership with the Google scanning project. (According to WebProNews, Stanford originally joined up with Google in December 2004.)

Whether the Google Book Search settlement will be allowed to stand is still up in the air.

Ars Technica has an article covering some of these objections in detail, and links to The Public Index’s list of individual filings. The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog had another piece from before the deadline looking at Amazon’s and academic authors’ objections, and the Times Online had a look at British authors’ reactions.

The revision does not seem to have changed many peoples’ minds. Even organizations such as Public Knowledge that approved of the spirit of Google Books felt that the orphaned works problem could be better solved through a change in copyright law.

But then, few expected it to. The main problems opponents have with the settlement—its opt-out instead of opt-in nature, the end-run around copyright law that it represents, the major first-mover advantage it cedes to Google—are endemic to its very nature.

No matter what changes Google makes, it is doubtful it could do anything to placate the critics without altering its plans beyond recognition. What happens now is anybody’s guess.

See also: "Lawrence Lessig on Google Books settlement: A possible danger to the future of our culture" and "High profile authors petition against Google Book Settlement" from earlier this week

TechCrunch has an excellent in-depth analysis of the piece, which you should read if you do not wish to read the whole thing.

In short, Lessig first describes the hideous piecemeal licensing structure of documentary filmmaking—rather than relying on fair use, every quote or bit of music has to be cleared individually when the film is made. Then, if the film is to be reissued, it all must be cleared again.

Then Lessig discusses the Google Books settlement, what it does right, and some of its hidden implications. Lessig lauds Google for doing better than the minimum fair use requirements in its settlement (for instance, gaining the right to quote up to 20% of an in-copyright book rather than snippets), but fears the settlement as a whole may be in danger of turning book copyright into the same kind of morass as documentary film copyright.

When you send your children to a library to write a research paper, you do not want them to have access to just 20 percent of each book they need to read. You want them to be able to read all of the book. And you do not want them to read just the books they think they would be willing to pay to access. You want them to browse: to explore, to wonder, to ask questions–the way, for example, people explore and wonder and ask questions using Google or Wikipedia.

The one flaw I see here is that Lessig seems to be assuming that Google Books will replace the use of printed books altogether. Even if you can only view 20% of a book in Google, there is no reason you should not be able to find the same book in hardcover in your library stacks, or request it through interlibrary loan if it is not there. Maybe it will take longer, but it is what you would have to do without Google anyway.

Lessig calls for copyright reform, and that is a call I can certainly agree with in any event. But I’m cynical enough now to doubt it will ever actually happen

CrunchGear points

However, France’s largest publisher, Hachette Livre, is notably skeptical, saying that publishers and booksellers do not always have the same interests.

France has always been touchy about foreign cultural influences—most famously maintaining an organization tasked with coming up with French equivalents to foreign-language loan words. French interests have also sued Google Books over the unauthorized scanning of French-published titles (and won) before coming to an agreement to work with them.

CrunchGear’s Devin Coldewey points out that the retail chains in question are chain stores run by multinational interests (who have probably been gouging the publishers for years). As for cultural preservation, Coldewey asks the rhetorical question, “[H]ow much culture do you feel the US lost when Circuit City closed?”

I suspect that the retailers’ efforts are probably doomed to failure at this point. Amazon and Google just have too much momentum, and it is doubtful the publishers have as much to lose as the retailers who are seeking their help. Either way, they will still be selling their books.

Now the “Do no evil” boys will no longer censor search engine results—something that, as a very small Google shareholder, I think they should have stopped doing long before this. Google may even end up leaving China.

So what does it all mean from an e-book angle? A bunch of questions arise, and I’d welcome some perspective from TeleRead community members.

–Will this affect Google digitization of Chinese books, and how? Google currently seems on the verge of reaching agreement with some Chinese publishers and writers.

–In the past at least, the Chinese have shown an interest in offering library systems and content. Would you use a system from a country that might bug it to the gills so it could spy on your users? Or maybe try to wipe out your national library someday, having sufficiently looked ahead?

–If Google exits, what kind of signal will this send to other Western companies doing business with China, including those in the e-book industry, which could benefit from Chinese expertise in displays and other areas.

–Getting close to home for Adobe, isn’t it interesting that the Chinese spiked e-mail attachments with malicious PDFs? I wonder about books from Chinese sources, and what kinds of tricks might be inside in the future. See why I hate e-books with executables? I don’t think this is a likely threat from Chinese commercial or library projects, but even as an unlikely threat, it’s scary.

The frustrating thing is that as both a participant in the e-book industry and as a market for tech and content, China has so much potential in the long term. Let’s hope that the Chinese will show some good intent and agree to let Google stop playing Big Bro. Maybe some good can ultimately come out of this mess. I’m rooting for all kinds of cool e-book apps to reach us from China—unbugged, let’s hope. Another argument for open approaches?

Meanwhile Adobe and rivals would do well to step up security efforts. From CNET:

Coincidentally, Adobe on Tuesday patched a zero-day vulnerability in Reader and Acrobat that was discovered in mid-December and was being exploited by attacks in the wild to deliver Trojan horse programs that install backdoor access on computers. Jellenc said he could not say for sure whether that was the vulnerability targeted in the attacks on Google and the others.

Reader was found to be one of the buggiest programs in 2009 and has been the target of numerous zero-day exploits in the wild.

Found on BoingBoing

We have mentioned the SFWA’s strong opposition to the settlement in the past. (The SFWA has also historically taken a hard line on digital infringement, issuing a mistakenly broad DMCA takedown notice in 2007 and then reinstating the man responsible, Andrew Burt, as chairman of its Electronic Piracy Committee.) The ASJA and NWU have similarly opposed the settlement.

It is doubtful the workshop will have any interest in presenting a neutral, balanced point of view, but it could be very interesting nonetheless. Admission is free, but the organizers ask that attendees RSVP ahead of time. Might any TeleRead contributors in the area be interested?

According to France 24, Mitterrand said that Google can’t be ignored but that France must “keep control of the digitization process and above all the distribution of the digital content … I will say to them again, when I visit them in California, that respect for authors’ rights must be a strict condition of any strong and viable partnership”.

(via Resource Shelf)

Over the past several years, university libraries have collectively built very large and very expensive collections of e-books that nobody reads.  These collections, often including the very best and highest demand academic titles, not only remain unread but may in format already be obsolete. They may never be read.

Instead of focusing on books downloadable to e-readers or smart phones, academic libraries have created enormous databases of e-books that students and faculty members can be read only on computer screens. The result, as shown by studies like the JISC national ebooks observatory project, is that these collections are used almost exclusively for searching for information—scanning rather than reading.

With a vigorous, searchable Google Books on the horizon, could academic libraries suddenly find themselves and their e-book collections completely bypassed by their students and faculty? The New Year finds both academic libraries and the big commercial publishers that serve the academic community in a state of paralysis, on the one hand knowing that their onscreen e-books are not reaching potential readers and on the other unable to embrace the exploding popularity of e-readers and smart phones as platforms for their content.

How did it come to this? In order to explain it’s first necessary to understand that the world of academic publishing and academic libraries, probably the single biggest sector of the current e-book market, is a strange parallel universe in relation to the rest of the e-book world. And in this strange universe, two fundamental laws currently govern all activities.

The First Law of the Scholarly Publishing Universe

The first law governing the scholarly publishing universe is that scholarly publishers are monopolies. If you’re only familiar with trade publishing this may seem counterintuitive. After all the trade publishing industry is full of publishers competing with one another for the consumer’s limited funds. But in the scholarly publishing universe publishers don’t necessarily provide books or journals that compete with those of other publishers.

Instead, they often feed the university the unique information it must have to stay on the cutting edge of research. For example, not all journals are equal. In order to support research at their universities, academic libraries must subscribe to certain high-status journals. Publishers, knowing that this makes them de facto monopolies are able to inflate the subscription prices for these key journals to astronomical levels (the phenomenon often referred to as the Serials Crisis.

The Second Law of the Scholarly Publishing Universe

The second law of the scholarly publishing universe might be called “The Library Director’s Law of Irresistible Attraction.” That law goes something like this: digital versions of high status journals are irresistibly attractive to library directors. These directors know that making them available to their students and faculty keeps everyone happy with the library, in turn securing both the library’s budget and the director’s future.

The two laws working together have meant that the big commercial scholarly publishers like Reed Elsevier and Springer Verlag have been in the unique position of forcing libraries to subscribe to packages containing all their e-journals. In other words, we’ll sell you the few you really need, but only if you take the thousands we publish that you don’t need. Since library directors had to have those few key journals, they agreed to take the whole deal.

Ebooks and the Digital Industrial Complex

Thus a symbiotic relationship was created between academic libraries and the big publishers, what I like to call the Digital Industrial Complex. Given their constant state of insecurity, libraries began buying as many digital resources as possible, regardless of quality or demand (and as we’ll see with e-books, format).

For their part, publishers were only too willing to provide new digital products for academic libraries to buy, again, without any understanding of the actual demand for them (and in a sense, they didn’t need to know whether or not students and faculty wanted these products since they knew that libraries would buy them anyway). And so, having secured, apparently in perpetuity, subscriptions to their entire ejournal lists from academic libraries, publishers began to work on the next frontier, e-books.

A few years ago publishers began offering packages of e-books to academic libraries. Since logic dictated that any library director worth his or her salt must be able to show their university presidents that they already possessed large collections of the Next Big Digital Thing, they were quite happy to buy these ebooks in large packages (those who hesitated risked “luddite status” and perhaps their jobs). Again, not buying the individual titles the university would actually need, but buying everything the publisher offered.

The publishers were offering e-books in the state of the art formats of the day, HTML and PDF. Academic libraries also began investing in very expensive platforms, like ebrary, for mounting these e-books. Publishers, academic libraries, and even the vendors of these platforms were all counting on one thing, that students and faculty would want to read e-books on computer screens—and even if they didn’t, well, that was the only technology available, so readers would simply have to adapt. But then readers had a choice.

Ereaders and Mobile Devices

Just as studies were beginning to show that readers will not read extended pieces of text on computer screens and would use these e-book collections simply for searching, not reading, the Kindle and the iPhone arrived. These devices have shown that dedicated e-readers and smart phones are e-book platforms par excellence; they make e-books work. But unfortunately for academic libraries they don’t work with the huge e-book collections they’ve amassed in HTML and PDF (at least not very well).

The result being that as the ownership of e-readers and mobiles begins to increase across campuses, the library’s e-book collection is in danger of becoming a very expensive white elephant, underused at best and perhaps already obsolete. For their part publishers are not rushing forward to convert these e-books to ePub so that they can be read on e-readers.

As one rep for a major publisher told me in December, their company is split internally over the risks involved in allowing their content to be easily read on e-readers. And so for the time being they have no plans to either retro-convert the ebook collections already held by libraries to Epub, or to start providing Epub for new titles.

In the end though, there may be a couple of ways to bring these ebooks into the 21st century and make them as popular on universities as ejournals have been. And one solution, in an acronym, is DRM…

To be continued…

This information is provided by the National Writers Union (we are not lawyers) to assist NWU members and all writers in making informed choices. The NWU as an organization opposed the original settlement proposal as unfair to writers, and continues to oppose the revised settlement proposal. The revisions to the settlement proposal fail to address our objections. But we encourage each writer to review the revised proposal in light of his or her individual situation, and to discuss it with fellow NWU members and other writers. The NWU’s Book and Grievance and Contract Divisions and chapters are available to assist NWU members. We invite you to join us!

If you have opted out and want to opt back in or you want to file an objection to the Amended Settlement, or if you want to claim a Book and Insert, here is the Google Book Settlement page with further information and forms.