Are authors’ interests and publishers’ interests in GBS aligned?
We now have three requests from authors of Google-digitized books in our collection to make the books Open Access (that is, make them freely readable online). In some cases, their requests conflict with their publishers’ desires. Maria will post a note later that explores some of these requests in more detail, but for now, I just wanted to focus on the idea that authors and publishers don’t always agree about the best way to both make the author’s work available, and to recover the cost of publishing or even make a little money. Especially with respect to books that are out of print, the decision about what to do is becoming more complex than it used to be. Availability in Google Book Search (GBS) holds forth the promise that perhaps with enough data about accesses to out of print books, their copyright owners will see an opportunity to make them available again, perhaps as print-on-demand. If this option is relatively cost-less for a publisher, why not just show preview view, and charge for full access?
Evidence is starting to mount that the more you show, the more sales increase. This is pretty much counter-intuitive to the publishers who expect that no one will pay for what they can get for free. But that often-stated and seemingly obvious “truth” is turning out to be quite a misleading misstatement of what’s actually going on with Open Access.
What one is willing to pay for when one buys a physical copy of a book that is also available for free on the Internet is not the same thing as what’s available for free. There are other aspects of purchased object. In the case of a book, there’s the obvious, the physical thing itself, a book I can put on my shelf with all my other books. Books mean something to me and to others. They speak about me, as well as to me. There’s convenience — my definition of convenience. If it includes having a physical book to thumb through when I next want to refer to something in the book, I might be willing to pay for that. On the other hand, I might consider the digital copy more convenient if I am at my computer all the time and can access my “copy” all marked up with my notes and comments, highlights and bookmarks, any time I want for a quick word search for the exact phrase I’m looking for to quote the author. I did this just the other day with one of Lessig’s books, Free Culture. The point is that if I want convenience and my definition of convenience includes having a physical copy, I might be willing to pay for that. I might also think a physical book is more portable if I’m planning a trip to the beach. But frankly, the portability advantage might be a toss-up if we are talking about more than one book.
But whatever the shape of the “deal” we are willing to enter into instead of Open Access, or more precisely, in addition to Open Access, there is more evidence every day that enough people consider the book itself worth having, that Open Access does not impair profitability even if it does substitute for a sale in some cases. It seems to open up the possibility of more sales than it obviates. Thus, it might even improve profitability. If this possibility is widely confirmed, authors’ and publishers’ desires might be entirely compatible with respect to the decision to make a work Open Access. But until it is firmly established, we are likely to have more requests from authors that conflict with their publishers’ more constrained forays into the new world of Internet marketing.
