More From Book Wars
Oct. 4th, 2021 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutReally, I may give up on this at any time. But for now . . . .
Chapter 3, the Backlist Wars is largely a profile of Jane Friedman’s time at Open Road, with a lead in that includes RosettaBooks, and a tiny bit about what happened at OpenRoad after. Like the profile of Touch Press / The Elements, if the entire book was made up of this kind of story, it wouldn’t be much of a book, but it would also not be particularly irritating and I would not be liveblog hate reading it.
Chapter 4, about the google digitization initiative and associated litigation, is a decent summary, but has one helluva quote in it.
“”We ring-fenced Google and, more importantly, we ring-fenced the libraries,” said Tom, a senior publisher at a large house. “To me, the danger wasn’t actually Google. I never thought Google ever wanted to do more than copy the books in order to use them in search. What scared me was that they were giving digital copies back to the libraries, and the library mandate is to get as much material free to as many patrons as possible. So the danger to me was always that Google was the intermediary: the libraries were the danger.””
You might wonder where the author of this book falls on this. Wonder no more, because here is the next bit:
“This danger was exacerbated by the fact that state university libraries are part of states and the Supreme Court has interpreted the 11th Amendment to the Constitution as granting states sovereign immunity from lawsuits seeking money damages… and it meant that suing Google was the only legal step that publishers could take to try to limit what state university libraries could do with the files. Moreover, just having all that digital content out there, and people beginning to think that every book in every language should be available for free online, would be a dangerous precedent not only for publishers but for writers too. So there was a lot at stake. … now, after all that happened with the Google Library Project, anyone tempted to embark on a similar project is going to think twice.”
Back to Tom: “by establishing what we did at that moment in time, I think we actually took that one off the table. I don’t think anyone’s coming back to try it again.”
Two observations here. First, and I think foremost, this is an open admission by a publisher, and endorsed by the author of this book, that the publishers view libraries as The Enemy. Second, the bad guy isn’t the tech company — the feared enemy is abundance, which will cause the price that sellers can charge to drop.
I got this book in part as a Know Your Enemy exercise. I guess it’s working.
Next up: the chapter on Amazon. You know it is not going to be good when the summary of Why Bezos Books has three reasons for books (commodity, two wholesalers and lots of books, more than can be stocked in a physical store) and conspicuously absent are the differentiators from CDs: while there were people selling books online before Amazon, they were weird, tiny operations (unlike the sites already selling a good number of CDs) and there were soooooooo many publishers, with the largest publishers selling a comparatively small slice of the total books in existence (very different with CDs — smaller number of publishers, much larger fraction of extant CDs produced by those publishers, which gave the publishers a ton of clout individually AND made it a lot easier for them as a practical matter to engage in trust behavior). The author of this book seems more preoccupied with how Bezos is not a TrueFan of books.
Wow. The description of the Macmillan / Amazon removes Buy Button interaction is described:
“By the time he had arrived back in New York on the Friday evening, Amazon had removed the buy buttons from all of Macmillan’s books, both print and Kindle editions, on the Amazon site — exactly the kind of aggressive action by Amazon that publishers had long feared.”
This was in response to a MFN clause demand. This was in _response_. _Response_. This is not “aggression”. This is not a “without provocation” situation.
The description of the DOJ action which ensued is written in the most astonishing way. You can go look up how the whole thing went down in wikipedia or go read the various conclusions. Per se violations were found, and upheld on appeal. And yet, this author focuses on the dissenting opinion.
Chapter 3, the Backlist Wars is largely a profile of Jane Friedman’s time at Open Road, with a lead in that includes RosettaBooks, and a tiny bit about what happened at OpenRoad after. Like the profile of Touch Press / The Elements, if the entire book was made up of this kind of story, it wouldn’t be much of a book, but it would also not be particularly irritating and I would not be liveblog hate reading it.
Chapter 4, about the google digitization initiative and associated litigation, is a decent summary, but has one helluva quote in it.
“”We ring-fenced Google and, more importantly, we ring-fenced the libraries,” said Tom, a senior publisher at a large house. “To me, the danger wasn’t actually Google. I never thought Google ever wanted to do more than copy the books in order to use them in search. What scared me was that they were giving digital copies back to the libraries, and the library mandate is to get as much material free to as many patrons as possible. So the danger to me was always that Google was the intermediary: the libraries were the danger.””
You might wonder where the author of this book falls on this. Wonder no more, because here is the next bit:
“This danger was exacerbated by the fact that state university libraries are part of states and the Supreme Court has interpreted the 11th Amendment to the Constitution as granting states sovereign immunity from lawsuits seeking money damages… and it meant that suing Google was the only legal step that publishers could take to try to limit what state university libraries could do with the files. Moreover, just having all that digital content out there, and people beginning to think that every book in every language should be available for free online, would be a dangerous precedent not only for publishers but for writers too. So there was a lot at stake. … now, after all that happened with the Google Library Project, anyone tempted to embark on a similar project is going to think twice.”
Back to Tom: “by establishing what we did at that moment in time, I think we actually took that one off the table. I don’t think anyone’s coming back to try it again.”
Two observations here. First, and I think foremost, this is an open admission by a publisher, and endorsed by the author of this book, that the publishers view libraries as The Enemy. Second, the bad guy isn’t the tech company — the feared enemy is abundance, which will cause the price that sellers can charge to drop.
I got this book in part as a Know Your Enemy exercise. I guess it’s working.
Next up: the chapter on Amazon. You know it is not going to be good when the summary of Why Bezos Books has three reasons for books (commodity, two wholesalers and lots of books, more than can be stocked in a physical store) and conspicuously absent are the differentiators from CDs: while there were people selling books online before Amazon, they were weird, tiny operations (unlike the sites already selling a good number of CDs) and there were soooooooo many publishers, with the largest publishers selling a comparatively small slice of the total books in existence (very different with CDs — smaller number of publishers, much larger fraction of extant CDs produced by those publishers, which gave the publishers a ton of clout individually AND made it a lot easier for them as a practical matter to engage in trust behavior). The author of this book seems more preoccupied with how Bezos is not a TrueFan of books.
Wow. The description of the Macmillan / Amazon removes Buy Button interaction is described:
“By the time he had arrived back in New York on the Friday evening, Amazon had removed the buy buttons from all of Macmillan’s books, both print and Kindle editions, on the Amazon site — exactly the kind of aggressive action by Amazon that publishers had long feared.”
This was in response to a MFN clause demand. This was in _response_. _Response_. This is not “aggression”. This is not a “without provocation” situation.
The description of the DOJ action which ensued is written in the most astonishing way. You can go look up how the whole thing went down in wikipedia or go read the various conclusions. Per se violations were found, and upheld on appeal. And yet, this author focuses on the dissenting opinion.