Re: Study suggests Google Book Search Helps Publishers A Lot More Than It Hurts Them

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

I find this article astonishingly simplistic, for many reasons, 
but will mention only a few here:

1)The author's data track only dollar revenues, not unit sales, 
so how does he know how much of the increase in revenues came 
from simple price increases as opposed to higher unit sales?

2)The data apparently cover the four companies' entire 
operations. How does he know how much these diversified 
companies earned in their different publishing sectors, e.g., 
from college textbooks, or from journals, or from reference 
books? He is leaping to strong conclusions from very highly 
aggregated data. The only way he could really make credible 
claims about market impact would be to compare sales of 
individual books, title by title, before and after they were 
included in Google's program. But he clearly has no access to 
such granular data.

)3He compares Google's digitization project to P2P file-sharing a 
la Napster. But Google's project was quite different from P2P. 
The proper comparison with P2P is outright cover-to-cover book 
scanning and piracy, which is indeed a major and increasing 
problem for the entire publishing industry, including university 
presses.

4)He claims that the charges about Google's monopoly power are 
refuted by his data. But those arguments were made about the 
Google Settlement, which has not yet been approved or gone into 
effect. So, it appears easy to prove that a monopoly does not 
exist--because, in fact, it does not yet exist!

5)He thinks that publishers' main objection to Google's 
digitization project was economic harm. But then why did so many 
publishers line up to sign licenses with Google for its Google 
Publisher project to begin with? We did because we felt it would 
have exactly the kinds of market-enhancing effects that his data 
are trotted out to demonstrate!

6)The chief objection from publishers was not economic harm but 
Google's bold attempt to subvert traditional copyright law and 
practice, which had always mandated "opt in" rather than "opt 
out." Note that the Settlement agreement explicitly compels 
Google to accept the "opt in" approach for all in-copyright 
works, with the agreed-upon exception of "orphan works." 
Publishers won that part of the battle.

7)There were, potentially, some economic damages from Google's 
library project, viz., its substitution of Google e-files given 
to the participating libraries, which might otherwise have 
purchased such files from the publishers. In retrospect, this 
seems to have been not a major economic harm to the extent that 
the libraries considered they could make only very limited use of 
these files (not much beyond putting them in a "dark archive"). 
The author of this article, however, doesn't even recognize this 
as a possible direct market harm. He focuses instead only on the 
impact that Internet exposure of limited portions of books might 
have on sales of the entire books. Amazon's "Look Inside the 
Book" and later "Search Inside the Book" had already taught 
publishers not to be fearful of negative consequences from such 
exposure. Rather, Google only helped extend the length of the 
"long tail" further, much to publishers' delight.

8)Thus, it appears, this author wrote an entire article based on 
a false premise, setting out to prove something that no 
publisher I know of would ever think to dispute!

And this got published in the Journal of the Copyright Society of 
the USA? Does it use peer review?

Sandy Thatcher


>Interesting paper from the Journal of the Copyright Society of
>the USA. It's authored by Hannibal Travis of the Florida
>International University College of Law.
>
>>From the abstract:
>
>"Originally advanced by publishing industry lobbying groups, the
>prevailing account of mass book-digitization projects is that
>they will devastate authors and publishers, just as Napster and
>its heirs have supposedly devastated musicians and music labels.
>Using the impact of GBS on the revenues and operating incomes of
>U.S. publishers believing themselves to be the most-affected by
>it, this Article finds no evidence of a negative impact upon
>them. To the contrary, it provides some evidence of a positive
>impact, and proposes further empirical research to identify the
>mechanisms of digitization's economic impact."
>
>Here's the abstract: http://bit.ly/bNNeLj
>
>You can get the full paper by clicking on a link in the abstract.
>
>Bernie Sloan