--- Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 11:19:19 -0500 To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> From: Stephen Cobb <scobb@private> Subject: Re: [Politech] Doug Isenberg on Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book" feature In-Reply-To: <6.0.0.22.2.20031113003206.021c4e20@private> Declan Thanks for alerting me to Doug's excellent article. As someone else whose writings are now globally published without remuneration via Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" feature, I have some comments (none of which are meant to be critical of Doug, who has done us all a favor by articulating the complex issues this feature has raised). My basic point is that this new search feature has very little to do with book sales. Doug wrote: "Obviously, Amazon must have thought the feature would drive sales, since it makes money not from searching but from selling." I disagree. Amazon makes money from book searches (it also sells a lot more than books). When you search for a book, you may get more than a dozen adverts/links to related and unrelated products, none of which are books and only some of which are sold by Amazon. Amazon has figured that someone researching carpentry books might also be ripe for a power tool pitch (and you can buy the tool from Amazon). But a search for network security books would be a good way to sell ads for firewalls (not from Amazon but from a vendor who pays Amazon to appear in those results). But you also get unrelated stuff like the advert for Nordstroms I got when I viewed the listing for my wife's book, Network Security for Dummies, which is downright spooky, as she likes to shop there. You can bet that Nordstrom is paying to be there, so the ability to search for books is creating revenue. Right now I don't see similar ads on the 'Search Inside' pages, but I would bet 10 free copies of my latest book that the plan calls for this eventually (the growth of ads on the regular book search pages has been slow and incremental, as though that makes it acceptable--which I guess it does if nobody but me objects). Doug wrote: And the publishers who signed up with Amazon must have thought the same thing. Unfortunately, my experience of large publishers is that they rarely 'get' new technology (a great MBA thesis would be "How publishers lose billions with bad technology choices"). The publishers probably bought the idea that "this sells more books." The point here, as Doug suggests, is "Whose books?" As the Authors Guild said in its alert to members about "Search Inside the Book," the effect will vary greatly according to the type of book. If I was Dennis Lehane (and reading his brilliant prose in 'Mystic River' makes me wish I was) I would not be worried. Very few people will read the book online to dodge the $4.79 special offer price. I bet more people are likely to buy novels if they can read a few pages and find they enjoy the style. But what about books like the $80 classic 'Computer Security Handbook'? This is not a cover-to-cover read and I am pretty sure sales will decline now that it is a free and freely searchable online reference. To be honest, as someone who teaches a university course from this book, I now find it more convenient to use the new Amazon digital version than the analogue one I have on my desk. And this is where, as my colleague, Ray Everett-Church, has pointed out, the Amazon impact may be most severe: electronic versions. Where is the market for an ebook version when there is already a free one on Amazon? Which brings us back to the legal issues, and "the effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work." Clearly it is not adequate to assess this on a single unsubstantiated claim (Amazon says "In the first five days, sales growth for titles included in Search Inside the Book outpaced growth for titles not in the program by 9 percent"). There are three factors missing here: 1. Actual sales impact on specific titles (I doubt sales of every searchable book went up) 2. Potential market impact (an ebook may now be hard to sell). 3. Perceived value (it will be hard to get people to pay $80 for a book that is 'free' online, and BTW, nobody is getting rich off $80 for 1200 pages). Finally, and this may be a surprise given what I have just said, I think the long term effect of the Amazon Search Inside feature may be a complete re-evaluation of the value of publishing. There are over a million books out there with my name on (assuming those that I wrote in the 80s have not been thrown away) but what those books earned in royalties ended up being a lot less than they contributed to my earning potential as a professional. So it may make more sense for authors to skip the whole publisher-bookseller-Amazon process and make their work available for free. At least that way authors can decide what ads, if any, appear when people look at their books, and spike potential exploitation of their work by online superstores. Stephen _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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