Google launched the Library Print project on Thursday and Amazon.com announced that it would offer online access to any page or section of a book, as well as the entire book. There is quite a bit of confusion, even in the publishing industry, about what these programs are so here’s my cheatsheet.
Google Print and the Google Print Library Project are two different programs.
Google Print is like Amazon’s Search Inside the Book. Publishers sign on to the program and provide a copy of their books so that Google/Amazon can scan and index the work. Google and Amazon offer users limited access to the book based on the user’s search terms–a limited number of pages forward or backward and a limited percentage of the total book. With Google, publishers are able to access site statistics on the number of times the title was viewed, the click-throughs on the Buy the Book links, and other goodies I’m sure. As a publisher you could use that information to optimize your own website pages and the descriptions of the book you provide to Amazon, Indigo, Barnes & Noble, etc. There is no fee to sign on to the program, however, publishers incur the cost of shipping titles to be scanned.
Google Print Library Project is the one caught up in US courtcases. In this program, Google has partnered with key US libraries to scan their entire collections (New York Public Library and the university libraries at Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford). The portion of the book made available to the user is dependent on the copyright. If the book is in the public domain then the whole book is accessible online. If the book is protected by copyright only the bibliographic data (title, author, publisher, etc.) is accessible plus a small except to provide context to the search term used.
Amazon Pages program allows users to “un-bundle” any of the books in the program. (It’s unclear to me how they determine which books are part of the program or which publishers Amazon is partnering with–maybe they haven’t worked out the details, the services are not yet available.) In the Amazon Pages program the user can choose to buy just the pages or sections needed and read them online.
Amazon Upgrade allows customers buying a physical copy of the book to also have the book available online for reading.
I’m interested in how the Amazon programs pan out because it seems they will run into publishers who have problems with how digital rights were assigned in author contracts and/or publishers who already provide ebook versions, again a rights conflict. The difference in approach will also be interesting to observe. Will Amazon engage with publishers in a different way than Google? For publishers, Amazon is another customer, they are a bookseller and there is an existing financial arrangement in place based on selling books. Not the case with Google. Google is making its money by increasing the number of pages it has indexed so that it can generate revenue off the ads it places on those pages. The unsung point so far in the Google discussions is that publishers in the Google Print program share in the ad revenue.