Safari Books Online 6.0: A Cloud Library as an alternate model for ebooks

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 132

There has been a lot of attention paid to ebooks lately, and for good reason. Electronic books are portable, searchable, and more affordable than print books. The web has accustomed readers to having the latest information at their fingertips; we all ask why books should be any less available "on demand."

Amazon’s Kindle has received the most mainstream attention (with new entries like Barnes & Noble's Nook making dedicated ebook readers into the latest competitive horse-race), but ebooks are taking off even faster on the iPhone and other smart phones. Ebooks are one of the most popular classes of iPhone application. Recent releases of O'Reilly ebooks as iPhone applications have even outsold the same books in print. Direct sales of the ebook bundles we offer from oreilly.com (PDF, epub, or mobi files) also exceed our direct sales of print books from the site.

Yet our most popular ebook offering by far is often not even thought of as an ebook. Safari Books Online is an online book and video subscription service, launched in partnership with the Pearson Technology Group in 2001. It contains more than 10,000 technical and business books and videos from more than 40 publishers. It has more than 15 million users (including the number of concurrent seats available through libraries and universities); it is now the second largest reseller of O’Reilly books, exceeded only by Amazon.com, and its revenue dwarfs our sales of downloadable ebooks. It's also the most affordable of our ebook offerings for those who are regular consumers of technical content. The average Safari Books Online subscriber uses at least seven books a month, and many use dozens (or even more), yet the monthly price (depending on the subscription plan) ranges from little more than the price of a single downloadable ebook to no greater than that of two or three.

Here’s the rub: most people thinking about ebooks are focused on creating an electronic recreation of print books, complete with downloadable files and devices that look and feel like books. This is a bit like pointing a camera at a stage play and concluding that was the essence of filmmaking!

At O’Reilly, we’ve tried to focus not on the form of the book but on the job that it does for our customers. It teaches, it informs, it entertains. How might electronic publishing help us to advance those aims? How might we create a more effective tool that would help our customers get their job done?

It was by asking ourselves those questions that we realized the advantages of an online library available by subscription. One of the best things about online technical books is the ability to search the full text of a book. How much better would it be to be able to search across thousands of books? Safari Books Online was our answer.

And it just got better. Safari Books Online 6.0, released yesterday, brings a new level of ease of use. It’s a complete, bottom-to-top revamping of the original service. The old UI was, to say the least, getting long in the tooth.

The new UI is slicker and faster, with the kind of drag-and-drop goodness that people expect from a modern web application. In addition, we’ve added some long-requested features, including:

Improved Interactivity -- With 6.0 you can make inline notes, in the actual text you are reading. You can dog-ear or bookmark specific pages. You can highlight text and associate it with notes. When you are done you can print those pages with both your highlights and notes on them. You can scroll non-stop through the pages of a book without any page refresh, or scan a block of pages in thumbnail view to spot the page you are looking for.

Personalized Folders - Rather than having thousands of books and videos organized by us in a single technology topic taxonomy, you can now put together your own organization, grouping books in the categories most useful to you. You can restrict searches to only the books you’ve chosen, and can search within the results of a saved search.

Collaboration - Even better, if you’re a corporate subscriber, you can share your categorization with other members of your company or workgroup. Not only can team members share folders, they can share book reviews, notes and highlights.

Smart Folders - New books, videos and articles are being added to Safari Books Online all the time. Searches saved as "smart folders" make it easy to keep up with the latest content in your area of interest. We have also improved our search user interface to allow you to search inside the book or in other books without leaving the page you are reading. Switch pages only when you find what you want.

As you can see, many of these features take advantage of the online medium in ways that aren’t possible with standalone ebooks. To be sure, there are times you want your own offline copy, and in Safari Books Online, you can indeed download books or chapters for offline use. But especially given the rise of the smartphone as an access device, the times when we are truly "offline" are becoming few and far between. The vision with which we started Safari, that of always-on access to a library of technical content, not just to individual ebooks, is now within reach. Safari Books Online can be used on a desktop or laptop computer or in the browser on a mobile phone. Everything is always in sync because your library is in the cloud.

An ebook cloud works the same way the web itself works. It provides ubiquitous access and shared experience.

Lessons Learned from the development of Safari Books Online

As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived at that decision, as well as some of the other lessons we’ve learned over what is now 22 years of ebook publishing experience. (O’Reilly published its first ebook, Unix in a Nutshell for Hypercard, back in 1987!) With that, a few reflections on lessons learned:

(continue reading)

Four short links: 5 October 2009

Bozo Cloud Talk, Annotation Fail(ish), Python MySQL Slash, and Infinite Books

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. Brown Cloud Marketing -- advertorial "interviewing" GM of a company offering "DNS in the cloud". This might be a worthwhile service, but the way he markets it (by saying open source is "freeware" and the market leader is "legacy") reveals a rich vein of bozo. Freeware legacy DNS is the internet's dirty little secret (actually, it's the reason we have a functioning DNS), Nominum software was written 100 percent from the ground up, and by having software with source code that is not open for everybody to look at, it is inherently more secure. (security through obscurity is equating clothing with being naked yet blind). The Internet kindly did the poor man's homework: screenshot of a cross-site scripting vulnerability in their customer portal, a Nominum security advisory from 2008, and the Nominum web server is running Linux, Apache, and PHP (all legacy freeware yet apparently not the Internet's dirty little secret). (via Bert Hubert and Securosis)
2. Public Annotations on Healthcare Bill -- using technology from SharedBook, Congressman Culberson hoped to get citizens marking up the healthcare bill. They're using the software but many are just commenting on page 1--turning the hosted annotation platform into a forum with an odd user interface. It's a UI challenge: designing a way to let focused people comment on specific things, while also permitting impatient unfocused people to comment on the general topic. It's like asking for a SmartCar that seats 80. See also OpenCongress and their annotation system which also has hundreds of comments on the first few lines of the bill (including 39 on the one line "111th Congress"--apparently more contentious than you'd think!).
3. MyConnPy -- pure-Python MySQL client library, useful because it requires no C compilation to install (and thus can work on systems without C compilers installed, e.g. mobile). (via Simon Willison)
4. The Infinite Book -- design concept for an ebook reader (not a product you can buy yet). Sexy. (via Gizmodo)

Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 30

"It is August, 1927, and Al Jolson is industriously, unwittingly, engaged in the destruction of one great art form and the creation of another...In four short years, the 'talkie' will completely subsume the silent movie." - from The Speed of Sound by Scott Eyman

The "Come to Jesus" Moment for the Book Business
In the age of the always on, it's fair to ask, do people read anymore?

Web content, video games, iPhone apps, Facebook sessions, YouTube videos, iTunes libraries, and Hulu media programming drive significant portions of our clickstream activity throughout the day.

Talking on the phone, emailing, and other forms of messaging sop up huge chunks of our free time, too.

As a consequence, book sales are stagnating, and have been for some time (this coincides with declines in all forms of print media - news and magazines included).

In big box retail land, Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble, is on life support. The independent bookstore is a shrinking breed, with less than 10% of the market.

Meanwhile, Amazon is the book industry's boogeyman, given their market share and proximity to the customer's wallet (the all important "billing relationship"). And the Kindle e-Book reader has the potential to entirely dis-intermediate the book publisher or, minimally, exert even stronger pricing power over them.

More terrifying, the book industry has no idea how to effectively market a book in a world devoid of bookstores, save for the hail-mary of an Oprah recommendation.

"Media doesn't matter, reviews don't matter, blurbs don't matter," says one powerful agent. "Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them."

And owing to a decades-old "consigment logic," unsold inventory is "remaindered." This is a euphemism for the practice of shredding unsold books and magazines. Not exactly green-friendly.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 14 August 2009

EPub FTW, SQL Horror, Computer Vision Explained, and A Massive Dump of Twitter Stats

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Page2Pub -- harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter)
2. SQL Pie Chart -- an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter and Simon Willison)
3. How SudokuGrab Works -- the computer vision techniques behind an iPhone app that solves Sudoku puzzles that you take a photo of. Well explained! These CV techniques are an essential part of the sensor web. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
4. Twitter by the Numbers -- massive dump of charts and stats on Twitter. I love that there's a section devoted to social media marketers, the Internet's head lice. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)

Four short links: 4 August 2009

NASA Cloudware, btrfs, eBook Editing, Exponential Death

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. NASA Nebula Services/Platform Stack -- The NEBULA platform offers a turnkey Software-as-a-Service experience that can rapidly address the requirements of a large number of projects. However, each component of the NEBULA platform is also available individually; thus, NEBULA can also serve in Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service capacities. Bundles RabbitMQ, Eucalyptus, LUSTRE storage, Fabric deployment, Varnish front-end, MySQL and more. (via Jim Stogdill)
2. A Short History of btrfs -- Now for some personal predictions (based purely on public information - I don't have any insider knowledge). Btrfs will be the default file system on Linux within two years. Btrfs as a project won't (and can't, at this point) be canceled by Oracle. If all the intellectual property issues are worked out (a big if), ZFS will be ported to Linux, but it will have less than a few percent of the installed base of btrfs. Check back in two years and see if I got any of these predictions right!
3. Sigil -- open source WYSIWYG eBook editor. (via liza on Twitter)
4. Exponential Decay of Life -- This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. (via Hacker News)

Scribd Store a Welcome Addition to Ebook Market (and 650 O'Reilly Titles Included)

by Andrew Savikas | @andrewsavikas | comments: 7

The document-sharing site Scribd has launched a new "Scribd Store" selling view and download access to documents and books. As part of the launch, there are now more than 650 O'Reilly ebooks now available for preview and sale in the Scribd store, and all include DRM-free PDF downloads with purchase. (Scribd will soon be adding EPUB as a format, and we'll make that available as soon as possible.)

Many publishers (including O'Reilly) have kept Scribd at arm's length because the service was often used by people posting copyrighted material without permission. Though Scribd was reasonably responsive to takedown requests, that puts the onus for monitoring on the publisher, a whack-a-mole scenario that will consume as many resources as you throw at it if you let it. But Scribd has implemented a new system that uses the ebooks provided for sale to identify (and remove) any other unauthorized versions of that material, as well as prevent future unauthorized uploads. Like any technology it's far from perfect (for example, I suspect scanned images are more difficult to test than standard PDFs), but it's good enough for us to be comfortable participating, and is as good an example as any of turning lemons into lemonade.

For a publisher (and I use the term loosely) the terms for the Scribd store are impressive -- publishers set the sale price directly, and keep 80% of the revenue (compare that to Amazon's DTP program, where the standard terms are that Amazon gets to set the actual price, and the publisher only gets 35% of their "suggested" price). There's also an interesting "automated pricing" option in Scribd, which uses an (unspecified) algorithm to set the sale price. But the pieces of the Scribd store I'm most excited about is the real-time reporting (compared with a lag of a month or more with most ebook resellers, including Amazon), the option to easily provide free updates to existing content, and the variety of adjustable display options -- like preview amount, refreshingly optional DRM, and purchase-link images. Administering and understanding your sales in Scribd is downright delightful compared with the same for Kindle.

A service like Scribd further reduces the barriers to content creators interested in self publishing digital material (and again offers much better terms than Amazon's DTP program for Kindle), so in some ways absolutely a threat to existing publishers. But we also view it as an opportunity to get our books in front of interested readers, and a promising sign that the market for ebooks is large enough to continue attracting startups like Scribd who bring needed diversity and competition among resellers.

Four short links: 14 May 2009

Open Source Ebook Reader, Libraries and Ebooks, Life Lessons, and Government Licenses

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 22

1. Open Library Book Reader -- the page-turning book reader software that the Internet Archive uses is open source. One of the reasons library scanning programs are ineffective is that they try to build new viewing software for each scan-a-bundle-of-books project they get funding for.
2. Should Libraries Have eBooks? -- blog post from an electronic publisher made nervous by the potential for libraries to lend unlimited "copies" of an electronic work simultaneously. He suggests turning libraries into bookstores, compensating publishers for each loan (interestingly, some of the first circulating libraries were established by publishers and booksellers precisely to have a rental trade). I'm wary of the effort to profit from every use of a work, though. I'd rather see libraries limit simultaneous access to in-copyright materials if there's no negotiated license opening access to more. Unlike the author, I don't see this as a situation that justifies DRM, whose poison extends past the term of copyright. (via Paul Reynolds)
3. Lessons Learned from Previous Employment (Adam Shand) -- great summary of what he learned in the different jobs he's had over the years. Sample:
   • More than any other single thing, being successful at something means not giving up.
   • Everything takes longer than you expect. Lots longer.
   • In a volunteer based non-profit people don't have the shared goal of making money. Instead every single person has their own personal agenda to pursue.
   • Unfortunately "dreaming big" is more fun and less work than "doing big".
4. Flickr Creates New License for White House Photos (Wired) -- photos from the White House photographer were originally CC-licensed (yay, a step forward) but when it was pointed out that as government-produced information those photos weren't allowed to be copyright, the White House relicensed as "United States Government Work". Flickr had to add the category, which differs from "No Known Copyright", and it's something that all sharing sites will need to consider if they are going to offer their service to the Government.

Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 54

There's a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle, there's no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there's Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.)

But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning. As I've said for years, that's a lot like pointing a camera at a stage play, and calling it a movie. Yes, that's pretty much what they did in many early movies, but eventually, the tools of production and consumption actually changed the format of what was produced and consumed. Camera angles, pacing, editing techniques, lighting, location shooting, special effects: all these innovations make the movies (and television) of today very different from the earliest movies. YouTube is pushing the envelope even further. Why should books be any different? (Aside: Bruce Sterling just published an amazing rant on this topic - how the context of pulp magazines shaped the content of early science-fiction.)

In our work at O'Reilly as authors and publishers, we've long been interested in exploring how the online medium changes the presentation, narrative and structure of the book, not just its price or format.

A sample from my latest experiment, The Twitter Book, can be seen below.

Now, you might ask, how is a book authored in powerpoint a web publishing experiment? It boggles the mind!

The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we've used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three), to impart key points, highlight interesting techniques or the best applications for a given task. Because the basics are so easy, there's no need to repeat them, as so many technical books do. Instead, we can rely on the reader to provide (much of) the implicit narrative framework, and jump right to points that they might not have thought about.

Perhaps the biggest driver, though, was the need for speed. We couldn't imagine writing a book about twitter that wouldn't be immediately out of date, because there are so many new applications appearing daily, and the zeitgeist of twitter best practices is evolving equally quickly. So we needed a format that would be really easy to update. (Again, modular structure helps, since new pages can be inserted without any need to reflow the entire document.) We plan to update The Twitter Book with each new printing.

The idea to write the book in powerpoint came to me while I was thinking about how quickly I write a new talk: I generally use pictures as visual bullets, to remind me about the order of my main points; I know what I want to talk about when I see each picture. And pictures are a memorable, entertaining way to tell a story. All I needed to do, I realized, was to write down some notes equivalent to what I'd be saying if I were giving this as a talk. (And in fact, I will be using portions of the book as the basis for my talk later today at the Inbound Marketing Summit, and a few weeks later at the Twitter Boot Camp.)

Of course, having the amazing Sarah Milstein as a co-author really helped. She immediately grasped the concept, and because she knows just about everything there is to know about the twitter app ecosystem, tools, and techniques, she actually provided much of the meat of the book. This allowed me to spend time on giving my perspectives on points that particularly matter to me, or that demonstrate my approach to twitter.

But even there, we saw real benefit in the format of the book. As wikipedia has demonstrated, collaboration is easiest when documents are constructed using a modular architecture. It's hard to coordinate a complex narrative (even single authors sometimes lose track of their plot details); much easier to work on things in standalone units that share a common, "interoperable" format.

I first explored this modular approach to the book in Unix Power Tools, a book I wrote in 1993 with the explicit goal of emulating the hypertext style of the web in a print book. The book consists of a thousand inter-linked articles. In the print book, the "hyperlinks" were in the form of cross references to individually numbered articles. In online versions such as the one at Safari books online, the cross references are expressed as real hyperlinks.

Similarly, our "Cookbook" series of technical books (whose format was originated by Nat Torkington in 1998 with the first edition of the Perl Cookbook), effectively creates a database of answers to common problems.

In 2003, Dale Dougherty and Rael Dornfest developed the Hacks series, another approach to books as collections of loosely-related pages. The Hacks books provide a collection of tips, tricks, and documentation on the problem-solving approaches of cutting edge users.

Of course, modularity isn't the only thing that publishers can learn from new media. The web itself, full of links to sources, opposing or supporting points of view, multimedia, and reader commentary, provides countless lessons about how books need to change when they move online. Crowdsourcing likewise.

But I like to remind publishers that they are experts in both linking and in crowdsourcing. After all, any substantial non-fiction work is a masterwork of curated links. It's just that when we turn to ebooks, we haven't realized that we need to turn footnotes and bibliographies into live links. And how many publishers write their own books? Instead, publishers for years have built effective business processes to discover and promote the talents of those they discover in the wider world! (Reminder: Bloomsbury didn't write Harry Potter; it was the work of a welfare mom.) But again, we've failed to update these processes for the 21st century. How do we use the net to find new talent, and once we find it, help to amplify it?

I don't exempt O'Reilly from that criticism. While we've done many pioneering projects, we haven't fully lived up to our own vision of the ebook of the future. For example, Safari Books Online, our online library, recognizes that the reference work of the future is far larger than a single book. But we've done a poor job of updating the works in that library to be more "web like" in the way I've just outlined. It is still primarily a collection of books online. (We're adding video, more web content, and working to update books to be more link-rich, but we're not as far along as I'd like.)

Take a look at any ebook, and ask yourself how it could be richer, more accessible, more powerful, if it approached the job it was trying to do with fresh eyes, and a fresh approach.

Many of the products that result won't look like books at all. After all, Google Earth is the new Rand McNally, Wikipedia is the new Brittanica, Google itself is the new competitor to many reference works, YouTube is becoming a vehicle for just-in-time learning, and World of Warcraft is the new immersive fantasy novel. What job do publishers do? And how can new media help us do it better?

Four short links: 3 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 9

The problems of Creative Commons around the world, ebook futures, open source biomed research, and a new open source conference:

1. The Case For and Against Creative Commons -- skip straight to page two, where the article talks about the places around the world where CC isn't working. "More exactly, they fear that if you try to convert artists to CC who had never thought of copyrighting their works before, they may simply fall in love with the concept of making money through full copyright and stick to it." (via Paul Reynolds on a mailing list)
2. Are We Having The Wrong Conversation About eBook Pricing? -- "The first TV shows were basically radio programs on the television — until someone realized that TV was a whole new medium. Ebooks should not just be print books delivered electronically. We need to take advantage of the medium and create something dynamic to enhance the experience. I want links and behind the scenes extras and narration and videos and conversation...". Yes, but radio shows still persist even though they're delivered through the Internet. Old formats don't have to die in the face of new media, the question is what's best for a particular purpose. I read books on my iPhone as I go to sleep at night ... I don't want hypermedia linked videos and a backchannel. I don't want the future of ebooks to be 1990s Shockwave CD-ROM "interactives". (via Andrew Savikas' delicious feed)
3. Sage -- "a new, not-for-profit medical research organization established in 2009 to revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease. Sage’s objectives are: to build and support an open access platform and databases for building innovative new dynamic disease models; to interconnect scientists as contributors to evolving, integrated networks of biological data." Apparently they'll be seeded with a pile of high-resolution very expensive data from Merck. (via BoingBoing)
4. Open Source Bridge -- open source conference in Portland, OR, started to fill the void when OSCON moved to San Jose. Very open source: they show you all the proposals, and you can even subscribe to a feed of the proposals as they come in. Many look good, though I'm pretty sure that 1993 called and wants its Tcl back. This conference might be just the excuse I need to visit Portland.

Competition in the eBook Market

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 9

There's been a lot of buzz on forward-looking publisher mailing lists in the past few days about Robert Darnton's piece in the New York Review of Books, Google and the Future of Books. When it hit techmeme today, I thought it might be appropriate to share more broadly the comments I made on the Reading 2.0 list (links added, minor edits):

Darnton's piece is eloquent, insightful...and wrong. I loved his history of the idea of reading as a driver for the enlightenment and the dream of America, his evident love for the mission of the librarian, and his worried disdain for profiteers who limit that mission, but on the subject of the Google Book Search settlement stifling competition, he can't be paying attention to the fact that the electronic book marketplace is finally taking off!

There has never been more competition either in electronic books, or for books, in the broader electronic "republic of letters."

It is true, perhaps, in the narrow sense, that no other party will be able to do a mass digitization project on the scale of Google's - but that was already true. The barrier has always been the willingness to spend a lot of money for little return; the settlement doesn't change that.

Meanwhile, the settlement provides absolutely no barrier to publishers providing their own digital copies, and this is in fact happening. At O'Reilly, we are selling digital copies of all our books through subscription services like Safari Books Online (which also includes thousands of books from other publishers), as direct downloads from our web site in pdf, mobi, and epub formats, and through emerging ebook channels like Amazon's Kindle, Stanza, and the iPhone app store.

Safari is now O'Reilly's #2 channel, behind only Amazon. Meanwhile, in its first month of sales, our IPhone: The Missing Manual, released as a standalone iPhone app (really, a bundle with Stanza) reached sales levels that would have made it the #1 computer book, beating all print computer books reported by Bookscan in that same period.)

In short, there's a strong economic motive for publishers to release digital editions of their books, and to treat Google Books as only one possible channel. If the revenues generated by GBS (via services enabled by the settlement) are significant, new titles will be released to that channel by publishers. But there's no reason why publishers will release their titles through GBS in despite of other possible channels. Google will have to prove its value, just like any other reseller.

Frankly, I'd be far more worried about Darnton's wished-for utopia, in which the government had funded the equivalent, mandating that all publishers participate. That might well have nipped the competitive ebook landscape in the bud.

As it is, we see lots of different competing approaches to bootstrapping this market. I'd say it's opening up very nicely!

Meanwhile, the republic of letters, and the republic of ideas, has moved beyond books in substantial ways, into dialogs such as we have here, into blogs, onto web sites and other information services. It's alive and well! By the time I'm done, I imagine that my email correspondence and online writings would fill fifty volumes, just as did the physical letter writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau and Voltaire that Darnton rhapsodizes. If only my writings (and those of hundreds of millions of others) were so worth preserving!

This is not to say that there aren't serious concerns with the Google Book settlement. James Grimmelman wrote a fantastic piece back in November, Principles and Recommendations for the Google Book Search Settlement, that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand just what the settlement means and how it could be improved upon:

Summary of principles and recommendations (hyperlinks take you back to the section of the document that discusses them)

• P0: The settlement should be approved
  • R0: Approve the settlement.
• P1: The Registry poses an antitrust problem
  • R1: Put library and reader representatives on the Registry’s board.
  • R2: Require the Registry to sign an antitrust consent decree.
  • R3: Give future authors and publishers the same deal as current ones.
• P2 If it didn’t already, Google poses an antitrust problem
  • R4: Strike the most-favored-nations clause.
  • R5: Allow Google’s competitors to offer the same services the settlement allows Google to offer, with the same obligations.
  • R6: Authorize the Registry to negotiate on copyright owners’ behalf with Google’s competitors.
• P3: Enforce reasonable consumer-protection standards
  • R7: Prohibit Google from price discriminating in individual book sales.
  • R8: Insert strict guarantees of reader privacy.
  • R9: Protect readers from being asked to waive their rights as a condition of access.
• P4: Make the public goods generated by the project truly public
  • R10: Require that Google’s database of in-print/out-of-print information be made public.
  • R11: Require that the Registry’s database of copyright owner information be made public.
  • R12: Require the use of standard APIs, open data formats, and (for metadata) unrestricted access.
• P5: Require accountability and transparency
  • R13: Require that Google inform the public when it excludes a book for editorial reasons.
  • R14: Tighten up the definition of “non-editorial reasons” for excluding a book.
  • R15: Allow any institution ready, willing, and able to participate in scanning books to do so.

I'd add to those recommendations one more: book search should work like web search. That is, because of the powers given to Google under this settlement, Google searches should be required to present and rank results from all electronic copies of books that are available online, not giving preference to the copies in their own archives.

I stand by my assertion that Google Book Search is good for publishers, authors, and the reading public. While the settlement does give Google what seems to be unprecedented power over the market for out-of-print but not out-of-copyright books, I'm not sure that market matters all that much to publishers, and it matters a LOT to the public. And in any event:

1. If there is significant value to be derived from these "under copyright but out of print" books, GBS will bring that value to the surface, and will then get those works on the radar of those who own those rights (if those rightsholders still exist.) Those parties can then start to exploit those rights through other available channels.

2. If there is no rights-holder to be found, we're no worse off than we were before, since there was no way of recognizing that economic value anyway. So the GBS settlement is worse, say, than just reducing the length of copyright, or requiring regular re-registration to keep books in copyright, letting those that are orphaned go more quickly into the public domain, but it's not worse than the situation before the settlement, in which no one but google was spending the money to digitize these works anyway.

There are no fewer incentives to digitize valuable works than there were before, and one can argue that GBS will bring to light works that will then become available to competing digital channels in ways that wouldn't have happened without the settlement.