Author Allen Harkleroad listed his books with Google Books and found out, only after listing the book, that some options that were not at all palatable to him were only shown after he had already listed his book.
Another item that disturbed me was several options in Google Books that I discovered by digging around such as allow libraries to display the entire contents of the books. While I do not mind people reading a portion of my book before buying I just cannot, financially speaking, afford to have the entire contents available.
He also round that the lowest level (20%) of preview exposed too much of his books. He writes “how-to” books and “… much of the previews that Google displayed as previews were the ‘meat’ of my books. Thus allowing browsers to see things that might encourage them not to buy the books because the information was in the previews….”
Damn those thieving libraries! Burn them! Burn them all!
While he’s at it, he should demand that his print publisher shrink-wrap each copy to prevent those cursed bookstores from allowing their so-called “customers” to open it before purchase. Maybe it should be booby-trapped for good measure…
While I’m sympathetic to the preview issues with a niche text like a How-to book, and would agree that Google probably needs to clarify a few points in it’s agreements, I still marvel at human beings’ continual willingness to cut off the nose to spite the face. Perhaps I’m too much an optimist on this point.
— C
“Thus allowing browsers to see things that might encourage them not to buy the books because the information was in the previews…”
Maybe he needs to write better books? If you’re worried about people seeing too much and being discouraged from buying, the I think the least of your worries is the quality of the publishing tools at Google Ebooks.
In defense of this author, if one is writing a how-to book, and for example, there are 35 “how-to” segments that are each 5-6 pages long, the author is probably counting on someone looking at the book in a bookstore and see that it shows how to do the specific task the customer wants to learn to do, plus other tasks the customer might want to do, and the customer will then buy it. With a Google preview, if the entire task is available for preview, the customer doesn’t need to buy the book, even though there may be additional items in the book the customer might be interested in. I think there’s a case to be made that the author should be able to give Google a list of pages that cannot be previewed at all.
If he’s worried about someone using just the first 20 percent (his book is about 200 pages of which 10 of that is probably front matter … that’s effectively 30 pages of preview) and getting all they need, I still think he’s got a content problem. The guy doesn’t write “50-weekend-projects” kinds of how-tos. He writes books on how to get creditors to stop harassing you. Presumably, there’s a process to this… if a potential reader is getting all they need to know in 30 to 40 pages, I wonder what he does to fill up the rest of the book and why he’s charging $20 for it.
Wow, this article certainly seems to have brought out the “information wants to be free” crowd. Author Allen Harkleroad said nothing in his Designer Today post about burning librarians. His criticism was directed solely at Google Book’s not-easy-to-discover and often author-unfriendly policies. His bestselling book has over a four-star rating and rave reviews on Amazon, so charges that “maybe he needs to write better books” seem unjustified.
Author Harkleroad is just being sensible. He’s not writing novels that have to be read cover to cover to be of any value. He’s writing how-to books on fighting nasty debt collectors. When Google gives away not just the first 20% of his book, but any 20% that comes up in search hits, they’re taking bread off his table.
We shouldn’t forget the Golden Rule about treating others like you’d want to be treated. Imagine yourself working hard at a job, enduring the long hours, because in the end you think you’ll be amply rewarded. Then imagine yourself discovered that you boss has pulled an obscure clause out of your employment contract, claiming it means he only need pay you two-thirds of what you’ve earned. Are you happy now? Authors feel much the same about Google Books and the even worse (and still in limbo) Google Book Settlement. Google is making money off their hard work and not paying.
I know. I’ve had over a dozen titles listed with Google Books for about five years. Every week Google sends me a report on the search hits those books get. I’ve yet to see any evidence that Google Books is helping their sales. (My best-selling book sells well because Michael Crichton recommended it in his last book.) I now keep them there as an aid to students who’ve got a paper due the next day and don’t have time for a printed copy to arrive in the mail.
Google’s behavior is not surprising. The major tech companies seem to be developing hardening mindsets around the behaviors that led to their initial success. Take two examples.
* Amazon got rich by commoditizing books, avoiding the expenses a typical bookstore goes through deciding which books to stock. It used the resulting savings to cut prices to the bone and beat competitors, hence all the dying bricks-and-mortar bookstores, especially the mom-and-pop ones. The result is an Amazon that’s almost clueless about book quality and that judges the books it sells almost solely by the profit margins they generate. To quote Oscar Wilde, Amazon “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” That’s Amazon.
* Google got rich by providing search links to content that people post online and want to be discovered. Today, the corporate giant seems incapable of realizing that quite a few creators of contents (meaning authors) depend on paid access to that content to feed themselves and their families. The result is that Google thinks 20% ought to be the lowest amount of content a Google Book provides. I know, I went over that very issue with them a few years ago and it was why I quit adding new titles to Google Books. It’s not that hard to see the fallacy of Google’s reasoning. When was the last time you read 20% of a book at a bookstore before buying it? I usually spend no more that 2-3 minutes browsing before I decide.
Think of it this way. Authors want to limit exposure to what they’ve written for the same reason that a landlord doesn’t want people living in his apartments for free or auto companies don’t want people driving their cars without making the payments that keep their factories humming. Landlords don’t have any problem with showing their apartments and car companies are happy to offer test drives. But neither wants that try-before-you-buy to eliminate the need to buy. And the same is true of work. We don’t mind going through an interview process for free, but we’d balk at a potential employer who wanted us to work for a week “for free, just to see if things work out.” Authors feel the same way.
Google doesn’t mind showing the very heart of an author’s labor because it didn’t invest the labor that an author has invested. For Google, books are just bytes. Keep in mind that the core business of Google is as the digital equivalent of a billboard company. It wants more space on which to plaster its paid ads, and it has sometimes been more than a bit unethical about how it acquires that space.
The original Google Book Settlement would have wiped out any U.S. copyright protection for any out-of-print-but-in-copyright book published anywhere on the planet in any language. It would have done so in almost every case without the author being aware of what was happening. That was the forced opt-in provision that still exists in the revision.
And Google made almost no effort to inform authors. In Japan, for instance, “informing” about the settlement meant a single ad in a major daily newspaper and one ad in a publishing trade journal. That was all. It was only when the actual facts of the settlement began to find ways around an ill-informed media that the settlement acquired substantial opposition, forcing a revision that still hasn’t been accepted by a court.
No, if you are an author Google is not your friend. Its goals (mostly advertising revenue) are different from your goals. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use and benefit from Google search results. I’ve got one book whose sales are probably driven by the fact that it tops a Google search. But we shouldn’t confuse using Google with being used by Google. And to use Google we need to be careful what agreements we sign with them. That’s what author Harkleroad is writing about in “My Personal Battle with Google Books.”
Okay, I agree with the author’s complaints about how Google lists books. But I also love this feature as a consumer.
I think it absolutely makes sense for popular, established authors to stick to heavy DRM, or better yet only real books, and let the desperate starving artist types give it away for free on Google, at least until they’ve “made it”.
It worked for Justin Halpern.
Fascinating!
“The result is an Amazon that’s almost clueless about book quality”
Who cares what Amazon understands or does not understand? I don’t want them to only sell me what “they feel like” selling me or as you put it “what is worth buying” I just want them to sell whatever ebook I want to buy. I stopped wanting bookstores to play judge and jury on my reading habits a long time ago.
“It’s not that hard to see the fallacy of Google’s reasoning. When was the last time you read 20% of a book at a bookstore before buying it? I usually spend no more that 2-3 minutes browsing before I decide. ”
Who are you? I mean WHY should I care what you do book browsing. I on the other hand do happen to read more of a book before purchasing it and I put the book back if it turns out to look like poorly edited junk or that buying the book would not be worth my while.
Getting back to the original post here… it sounds an awful lot like Author Allen Harkleroad and several commentators here know for a fact that reading 20% of any of their books, they seem so proud of, would lose them customers. Because those online readers might figure out something they don’t want the “rubes” to know.
That’s what it sounds like to me. Your local librarian just might be able to help you in coming to that understanding as well. A fact I am sure Author Allen Harkleroad hates also.
I love the stealing food from my kids routine. Get a real job then.
I made a snarky comment about libraries because of the author’s specific complaint that libraries can display the book’s contents. Well, cry me a freaking river. That’s how libraries work, dumbass.
Nowhere did I say or imply that he should give anything away. Indeed, I specifically noted that Google probably needs to be clear on these issues prior to listing. I’ll warrant that if he’d actually spoken to anyone at Google about his concerns, at least this portion would get addressed.
However, my point still stands: his concerns are no different than concerns he clearly has with selling print copies; specifically, a bookstore patron with a notebook can read the relevant portions–a practice that the big box booksellers actively encourage in their browser-friendly stores, complete with easy chairs–and take away the information without paying. That this doesn’t seem to concern him just betrays that the author has an agenda or hasn’t bothered to actually think the issue through.
— C
lol@ferrule…
On the piece itself: while it would be nice to ‘go back’ to the days of no freebies, today’s economy and consumer mindset combined make for a give-to-get business environment, one which rather goes across the board. We also have the 20% option triggered on our Smashwords eBook title ‘Draw Me a Picture’ (and will likely do so for the other titles currently being uploaded) despite its size of over 170,000 words. Having a fifth of the eBook free is not as bad as having to give away free novels in order to sell any. Instead of choosing the latter option we penned a few short stories and posted them free on Scribd, Fictionaut and Figment, which has generated new web-traffic and sales.
Consumers reasonably want a good taste of your work before purchasing, especially with a glut of eWriters flooding the market, but–on the other hand–I can see where the Google Books non-disclosure up front on the minimum options would cause author anxiety. We have yet to post on GB and ma think on it more thoroughly before doing so. Great post.
I sympathise completely with the Author about being upset with Amazon at not giving him full disclosure about conditions until after he listed the book.
This is unacceptable, and needs to be fixed. There should be TOTAL disclosure of all conditions and details, and everything of that sort, available to authors before they even start the listing process.
The other issues concerning disclosure by the author of content are completely separate and apply to all authors.
I completely understand his concern about 100% of the book being viewable, though I don’t really understand the issue totally because I understood libraries would provide 100% to borrowers anyway .. but clearly I am not sufficiently familiar with this issue to opine in detail.
Even though he writes how-to books I believe his hyper-sensitivity about losing money, and someone else’s comment about him losing food off his table, are wholly misguided. People don’t read a couple of useful tips and then say thank you and walk away. They are FAR more likely to buy the book, if it priced at a reasonable level, having received a couple of valuable tips .. if they are good tips. If he is concerned that his tips are actually useless, then I would agree that they would better be hidden.
Someone also commented on 20% being viewable on Amazon. With fiction I don’t believe that visitors want to actually READ the 20%. That’s not it. They use the 20% to browse through the 20% reading short snippets to get a ‘flavour’ of the book. That makes perfect sense and is nothing to worry authors, quite the opposite. I don’t agree with the knocking of the writer suggesting he write books where no information is in the first 20%. That is just dumb.
I am nevertheless constantly dumbfounded by the appearance of author after author on this and other similar blogs, who have completely convinced themselves that the nasty pirators and nasty public downloaders, and now the previewers, are stealing the money out of their pockets and the pockets of their innocent children and grandchildren and grand grand children. Clearly they are either being sucked into a disingenuous fantasy being created by the Publishers and Agents or just far too imaginative for their own good.
Another thing – I want to remind the author that in any bookshop I visit the book on the shelf are not shrink-wrapped. I am free to read 100% of the book. Not only that but on many many many occasions I have sat down in the seats provided and read through tracts of many books. I know of bookshops with coffee where visitors often read sections of books. When I was in Paris once I was in their biggest bookshop which I believe might have been called Fnac. I found dozens of people scattered throughout the shop sitting on the floor or on chairs reading.
I would see this history of 100% availability as being one of the biggest drivers of sales and hence, yet again, I just don’t understand the uber-sensitivity of some authors to the preview function on eRetailer sites.
I have no problem with the preview function, it just seems that the listing on the google books site does not do anything for the author, only sells advertising for google.
There are also pirate sites that offer software for downloading the pdf file – for nothing. I had been wondering where the illegal sales of my book as pdf and for ipad had come from and will cancel my book on google at the next available opportunity. In fact searching for the method and deadlines involved brought me here. Amazon has got ‘look inside’ which is just as good. And hopefully, they don’t make the whole pdf file available to libraries. We do need to pay for the electricity of our computers. Free rides are not helping us to survive. They also are depressing because you do not know of the free rides and you get a distorted picture of how high (or low) the interest for your work is.