Industry wrestles with the Interweb
Is book publishing going the way of the record industry? The Society of Authors, which represents more than 8,500 professional writers in the UK, is concerned that book piracy on the Internet is eating into authors’ sales.
Times Online reports:
Tracy Chevalier, the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring who also chairs the London-based organisation, said that her members were deeply concerned that the publishing industry was failing to adapt to the digital age.
The internet is awash with unlicensed free digital copies of individual chapters or in some cases entire books. Prominent victims of book piracy include Jamie Oliver and J. K. Rowling but the most vulnerable writers are less well-known poets, authors of short stories and writers of cookery books.
Some of the biggest names on the internet are effectively becoming digital publishers, not necessarily with the support of the book industry. Google is locked in legal disputes with authors and publishers over its plans to make available free electronic copies of every book over the next ten years. Amazon has found that its “Search Inside” function, which allows readers to see selected pages of books, has increased sales.
Ms Chevalier told The Times that the century-old model by which authors are paid – a mixture of cash advances and royalties – was finished. “It is a dam that’s cracking,” she said. “We are trying to plug the holes with legislation and litigation but we need to think radically. We have to evolve and create a very different pay system, possibly by making the content available free to all and finding a way to get paid separately.”
As with music downloading, having book excerpts and other content on the Web has been shown to increase interest in the material, but that doesn’t appear to be translating into sales. And given how long it’s taking the music biz to wake up to the realities of the digital age, perhaps it’s timely that the Society of Authors is taking up the issue in the literary realm.
“Unlicensed free digital copies of entire chapters” might be permitted under fair dealing (U.K., Canada) or fair use (U.S.) A search-inside-the-book feature, no matter who offers it, clearly meets the fair-dealing test in Canada if it displays only excerpts (compare a recent court decision, which I don’t feel like looking up right now, about playing small snippets of songs before purchase).
The article does not demonstrate that many, let alone most, books on the best-seller list in the last three years have ever been duplicated in this way. And such books are merely the tip of the iceberg.
Without any facts behind the claim of widespread copyright infringment, the claim seems exaggerated or simply false.
The publishing industry continues its tradition of being ass-backward about the Web, and authors and their representatives continue to misrepresent copyright as an absolute prohibition against any copying they don’t know about and approve in advance in writing.