usedbooks[1] Aaron Miller has a brief post on the FrontMatters blog about Google’s book digitizing service. You can send in whole boxes of books and get them digitized, OCR’ed, and converted to “a multitude of digital formats.” The only problem, Miller notes, is that the service isn’t available to consumers, but is for publishers only.

And it’s not likely that Google will offer it to us, ever. The likely outcome will be that eventually every mouldering tome in our decrepit paper collections will already have been scanned and available — and we’ll have to pay for it again to get it that way. We’ll still have all this decaying paper and not know exactly what to do with it.

Miller wishes there was a publisher or distributor who would market “permanent backups of your paper in the cloud” in return for sending in your paper copies. He suggests that, by destroying used copies instead of keeping them around for resale, this would be “some kind of sweet vengeance on the first sale doctrine”—keeping material from entering the used-book ecosystem that publishers continue to loathe.

But since the publishing industry keeps trying to force digital back into the print business model, Miller says, this isn’t likely to happen—even though Google and Amazon keep metaphorically knocking them down and stealing their lunch money.

I think Miller might be onto something here with his idea for book-to-e-book upgrading. But I had an idea that will go his one better:

Why don’t publishers go into the used book business themselves? Set up a kind of “Gamestop for books”: let consumers send their old, in-resalable-condition paper books in, maybe charge a buck or two per book for handling, and send them an e-book copy of the book in return. Since digital media doesn’t have a per-unit manufacturing cost, they’d be turning a profit right there—getting physical goods (and possibly a handling fee) in return for something that cost them nothing to produce. The publisher gets something for “nothing”, the consumer gets the electronic copy he wanted and reclaims the space that book formerly took up—it’s win-win.

And then the publishers could turn right around and resell that used book at bargain basement rates for those people who still prefer P over E. They’re not going to have too much in the way of material costs to cover; heck, if they charged a small handling fee the consumer would have paid them to take the paper book off his hands. They could undercut used book dealers on Amazon, just the way Amazon “undercut” their hardcover prices with its $9.99 e-books, and still make money. And if publishers are so concerned that royalties from used book sales should go to the authors, they would be in the perfect position to put the authors’ royalty money where their mouth is if they were selling the used books themselves.

I really like this idea, and it’s a pity that it probably won’t ever see the light of day. If it is going to be useful, it should probably take place while there are still plenty of p-book buyers who haven’t converted over to e-books yet.

(Found via our very own “Around the Web” panel—see, Marilynn, it’s not all gourmet marshmallows. :))

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11 COMMENTS

  1. Perhaps you’ve never digitized a book. OCR isn’t magic. It generates a slew of what we call scannos over at Distributed Proofreaders. “tbe” instead of “the”, “arid” instead of “and”, etcetera. OCR can mess up royally on items like sidenotes, footnotes, and tables. It takes human brain, eye, and hand to correct all the mistakes and make sure that the etext is properly rendered.

    OCR can be quite accurate on recently printed books with crisp type and no pesky sidenotes and tables. It can fail utterly on older books originally printed with worn type and now decayed, with flyspecked, mottled, and scribbled pages. Also fails with blackletter and fraktur.

    Google’s uncorrected OCR is crap. It would cost serious money to pay all the humans necessary to turn crap into gold.

  2. The primary problem with this idea is that publishers don’t have the ebook rights to many of the old paper books so they have no right to digitalize them, and if they do have ebook rights, they’ve probably already made them available as ebooks.

    Publishers aren’t set up, either, to handle the warehouse and manpower of this kind of system so the scheme would cost far more than it would make.

    I have nothing against gourmet marshmallows although I prefer gourmet jellybeans, but that “around the web” feature would be better much lower and the comments section much better higher and longer to keep people on the original site at least long enough to scroll a bit of content and look at the vanity press ads.

  3. Digitization rights isn’t the issue – rights to selling an ebook is. It breaks down like this:

    1. Send in your paper book to have it digitized and get an ebook back of your specific book. This is perfectly legal today.

    2. You sell the paper book to a used book seller, which is also fine.

    The problem arises though in that if you sell the paper book, you no longer legally have a right to keep the electronic version you created. It would be equivalent to selling your CDs/DVDs on ebay, and keeping ripped copies on your computer. 1 or 2 in isolation work fine – together I’m sure some kind of liability claim could be made against the publisher by the copyright owner.

    Incidentally I think the publishers would rather see the used book market collapse entirely than to take part in it, due to what it represents – a race to the bottom on the prices of books. If they do have the ebook rights for a book in question, they may simply destroy a used copy rather than resell it, since that way they’re putting it out of circulation on the used market.

  6. Re: comment #5 by Al:
    Actually, it is not as bad as you think with the proper equipment and if you are willing to destroy the book in the process. I digitized a book which I badly wanted on my Kindle. it is out of print and not available as an e-book. I used a paper cutter to remove the headers and page numbers, being VERY careful to keep in order, then put it through a ScanSnap sheetfed scanner which produced a .pdf. Dragged the .pdf into the OCR software which comes with the scanner and ended up with an .rtf document. Saved that in Word as HTML, did some cleanup and correction of a very few OCR artifacts. Then had Calibre convert the HTML to .mobi. A lot of what is being done is automated so it doesn’t take as long as you would think. I have a fairly decent copy of it for me alone on my Kindle.

  7. Chris – that’s exactly the problem. IANAL, but the electronic rights to the specific OCR’d copy of the book are in this case tied up to the physical copy of the book. Sell or give away the physical book to someone else, and you no longer have legal rights to own the digital file as I understand it. You could *maybe* argue format shifting/backup if the paper copy was destroyed, but even so I don’t see the owner of the ebook license seeing it that way.

  9. Google have their own reasons for the service but clearly they are not based on the potential revenue stream. To my mind it’s not a viable business for publishers to get into considering the set up costs, the likely fee the individual would pay and the advantage to the publisher.

    Personally I don’t think individuals will care much for the legal issues. They have a sense of the wider issue and if you bought a book then you own it for your own consumption. Whether it fits the out of date legislation or not won’t both most people.

  10. There are two places where eBooks could be improved. both have to do with lending copies while still getting income when copies are loaned to people with eBook readers.

    1. To devise a way where if I wanted to share an eBook, either I or the othe party would pay a small fee for a code to unlock the DRM for a one time transfer. If the other party wishes to share it with a third party, it would call for another one-time unlocking fee, etc.

    I am not familiar with how Amazon and other on-line ebook stores pay for the books they sell. Do they buy a master copy and then pay a fee to the publisher for each eBook they sell? f that be the case, why not do the same for libraries . . . .

    2. . . . . Rather than sell, as they do now, to libriaries several copies of an eBook, sell them a master and they would pay a fee for each time they loan the eBook. Why should a library have to buy multiple copies of an eBook if the book does not get many calls for it . . . and on the other end, if a book becomes very popular, they do not run out of the eBook to lend.

    What we have now is a built in inefficiency related to eBooks when in the computer based world, the so called advantage is that computers increase efficiencies. Publishers are asking libraries to guesstimate how many copies of an eBook they need to buy when there is no track record to do semi-accurate guesstimates.

    With many libraries facing funding crunches, doing as I suggest would hel them stretch their book purchasing budget and that money could be used in other areas where there is not enough funds to do.

    This format of selling eBooks will make a more accurate judgement of when a book becomes a best selling book as each book can be tracked by how may were sold to individuals and how many were loaned vs as it is now, determination is made by how many books are sold to libraires and stores but now how many were sold or read by the public.

    Alan J. Zell, Ambassador of Selling, Attitudes for Selling

  11. Great article, Chris!
    Your concept of “Gamestop for books” is rather interesting and relevant considering the current migration from paper to digital media.
    I have just a simple suggestion… 🙂

    Simplify the scanning process: don’t perform OCR on those books (!).

    Scan them with a good resolution (like 300dpi’s) and forget about OCR’ing the image.
    Think of these old books as “really” old books, like Middle Ages documents or ancient papyrus (!) where you just want to archive the “image” of the page for historical purposes.

    I’d be interested in reading/having my old books in digital format, and would be willing to let go of text search on this context.

    So, just scan and forget about OCR (+ text search) for old books: It’s easier, faster and keeps 100% of the page layout/formatting.

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