I Wish Apple Loved Books

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Regardless of what any agreement may have been interpreted as giving them (Google) the right to do, no one with any sense believed that Google was ever intending to sell copyrighted works that they didn't hold the rights to sell.

Actually, the settlement gave them blanket rights to exploit orphan books so long as they held a fraction of the revenue in case the copyright holders squawked. That was why there was such a big fuss over the "land-grab"; the idea that publishing is an affirmative act by the rights holder and not a default they need to opt-out from.

http://blog.librarylaw.com/libraryla...ign-works.html

[DiapDealer]

Ah... so the lawsuit essentially stopped Google from creating a giant ebook store filled to the brim with works whose copyright holders weren't actively protecting their rights any more? I stand corrected. We certainly dodged a bullet there.

[BearMountainBooks]

I'd love it too if they cared about ebooks. I'd love it if they allowed me to upload and manage my own ebooks without having to buy their very expensive hardware (and not just once, but every few years). I'd love it if I could use my current iPad to upload and manage books, but it is not on the approved list. So it turns out that I don't buy books from Apple and I use a third-party app to load books there. It's not a fun or very rewarding experience--it takes DAYS to work, pricing can be wonky, sometimes it requires intervention to get it working.

Authors and readers need Apple to provide competition for Amazon. They aren't really doing it and I fear, that like B&N, they have dropped the book/ball.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Ah... so the lawsuit essentially stopped Google from creating a giant ebook store filled to the brim with works whose copyright holders weren't actively protecting their rights any more? I stand corrected. We certainly dodged a bullet there.

If you go back to the 2009 threads here and in Teleread you'll find google had a lot of supporters because they were promising to bring out ebooks of tons of out-of-print titles.

It was 2009.
A wholly different era.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

If you go back to the 2009 threads here and in Teleread you'll find google had a lot of supporters because they were promising to bring out ebooks of tons of out-of-print titles.

It was 2009.
A wholly different era.

Bring back out-of-print titles?! Why the audacity! That would have been horrible.

OK, so I was wrong. I can admit it. But when someone tells me the AG lawsuit stopped Google from creating an ebook store from their scanned books, I got the distinct impression that they were talking about preventing them from selling their scanned copies of King, Baldacci, Rowling, Binchy, Murakami, et al. Not that Google had in fact, had the audacity to want to make ebooks of titles that publishers no longer saw enough value in to keep in print. My mistake.

Some of those authors of out-of-print books sure owe the AG a debt of gratitude for keeping Google from bringing any attention to works of theirs that can't be purchased anywhere anymore.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Bring back out-of-print titles?! Why the audacity! That would have been horrible.

OK, so I was wrong. I can admit it. But when someone tells me the AG lawsuit stopped Google from creating an ebook store from their scanned books, I got the distinct impression that they were talking about preventing them from selling their scanned copies of King, Baldacci, Rowling, Binchy, Murakami, et al. Not that Google had in fact, had the audacity to want to make ebooks of titles that publishers no longer saw enough value in to keep in print. My mistake.

Some of those authors of out-of-print books sure owe the AG a debt of gratitude for keeping Google from bringing any attention to works of theirs that can't be purchased anywhere anymore.

Yes they do.
Because what happened was that the savvier authors got their rights reverted and published their backlist themselves. So instead of the crumbs google and the Authors Guild negotiated, they got to make good money.
That wasn't the intent but that is how it ended up.

So today we have most of the out of print titles readily available anyway but the money goes to the authors or their heirs instead of google and the AG.

[gweeks]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Some of those authors of out-of-print books sure owe the AG a debt of gratitude for keeping Google from bringing any attention to works of theirs that can't be purchased anywhere anymore.

No, it was the AG that was trying to give away all of the authors rights. The give away was happening in the settlement between the AG and Google. Google didn't start out trying to republish everything. Of course when the AG tried to give it to them they would take it. What stopped it was the judge said the settlement was too broad and they needed to come up with something else, or actually go to court. They went to court and the AG lost so google was allowed to do the scans and keep them for searches.

Greg