Amazon.com wants to allow full-text searches across thousands of books to help shoppers preview the wares. This could be a major boost for e-books since Amazon will scan oodles of p-books into its database. It’s hard to believe that many won’t end up online in electronic form for sale to consumers, regardless of what Amazon might say right now to confuse competitors. Some details from the New York Times:
Amazon is calling its program Look Inside the Book II, the publishers said. It would expand on a current program that lets shoppers read a table of contents, a first chapter or a few selected pages provided by the publishers of certain books. But Look Inside the Book II would let online browsers search by terms such as “Caravaggio,” “sans-culottes,” or “Osama bin Laden,” and then see a list of books mentioning such terms along with the sentences that contains them. Browsers could then choose to see several pages around a citation.
But to see those pages, users would be required by Amazon to register, and Amazon plans to limit the amount of any single book a customer can view.
Meanwhile another clash might lie ahead between Amazon and the Authors Guild, which earlier fought with Amazon over the selling of used books on the same pages as used books. As written up in the New York Times:
Most book contracts allow publishers to give away excerpts for promotional purposes, but authors may contend that Amazon’s search service more closely resembles some kind of research system. “This sounds like an anthology right, and that has to be specifically approved by the author, and if a publisher is going to license the electronic rights to the whole work there has be to reasonable compensation for that,” said Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild.
No battle will happen, of course, if the Guild and Amazon can work out the business details. But the two have been far enough apart on other issues to suggest possible resistance to the Amazon proposal. This time the Guild may have more legal clout than it did over the used-book issue.
If I were the Guild, however, I’d think twice before repeating the earlier mistakes. This actually is an opportunity if Amazon plays fair. Imagine the extra revenue to authors from the p-books turned into e-books.
