|
|
|
|
|
The
Brave New World of Book Buying
by Reid Goldsborough |
December 1, 2003 |
|
“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one
side as it gains on the other.... For every thing that
is given, something is taken,” wrote Ralph Waldo
Emerson in his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance.”
The newest application of this old wisdom involves the
world of book buying. Amazon.com, the Web’s best
e-commerce site, is also the world’s largest bookseller,
and it has recently introduced new features that make
book buying even more enjoyable, convenient, and economical.
But these same features have some book authors reaching
for their poison pens.
Amazon.com for some time has done a great job of providing
context about a book to help you make a buying decision.
Unlike in a bookstore, you can quickly search for books
by title, author, and subject, and with any books that
look interesting, you can read reviews by professional
book reviewers and fellow readers. With many books, you
can also browse through a limited number of pages to see
if the author’s writing style fits your expectations.
With some books, you can now also “Search Inside
the Book.” You type in a search term, and Amazon.com
finds books containing the term and lets you access any
page containing it plus the two preceding and the two
following pages. This is what has caused the controversy.
The Authors Guild, an advocacy group for writers, tested
Amazon.com’s “Search Inside the Book”
feature and discovered you could copy and print out more
than 100 consecutive pages from a single book, though
doing so was time-consuming. Amazon.com has since disabled
the print capability, but you can still, without much
technical expertise, capture the screen and print it out
otherwise.
What would stop you ... besides your conscience ... from
collecting cooking recipes or travel suggestions this
way, without having to buy the book? “Most reference
books [are] at clear risk in such a database,” said
the Authors Guild in an e-mail message to members. For
this reason, not all book publishers participate in the
program.
Amazon.com defends “Search Inside the Book”
by pointing to its utility. “We believe that the
more information you give a customer about the products
they’re interested in buying, the more of those
products they actually buy,” said Jani Baker, director
of product public relations, in a phone interview. In
the first 5days of the “Search Inside the Book”
program, sales of books that were included in the program
were 9 percent higher than sales of non-participating
books, she said.
In various online discussion groups, readers are overwhelmingly
positive about the feature, as expected. Fiction writers
also like it—readers need the entire novel. Nonfiction
writers are divided, with some supporting it. Karen Heyman,
a science writer in Santa Monica, Calif., feels it will
be a boon to researchers while not hurting authors.
If fully implemented, she said in an e-mail interview,
“it will spare you having to spend hours in a library
going through the indexes of dozens of books on the off
chance one of them might have something applicable.”
She doesn’t see it reducing book sales. “I
completely agree with the idea that this will lead to
more books sales, not less, because you get introduced
to many books you wouldn’t otherwise have found.”
The ultimate would be for Amazon.com to become a Google
for all published content. Just as you can search the
Web now, in the future you may be able to search through
the typically higher-quality information published in
books. Time will tell if this will happen comprehensively
and how it will affect book sales.
Fewer sales is also a concern with another Amazon.com
feature, “Marketplace,” where you can buy
used books from fellow readers as easily as you can buy
new books from publishers. The savings can be dramatic,
and the potential loss of earnings to book authors is
self-evident.
Amazon.com defends this practice as well. “Amazon.com
is all about selling more books and helping customers
find and buy books they wouldn’t have known about,”
said Baker.
“We’ve found by offering customers lower priced
options, it causes them to visit the site more frequently,
which in turns leads to higher sales of new books,”
she continued. “It encourages people to try authors
and genres that they might not otherwise have tried. Also,
when customers sell used books, they have more `budget'
to buy new books.”
What is clear is that it’s a changing world out
there, in book publishing and the larger world of information
technology. As always with change, there are winners and
losers.
Reid Goldsborough is a syndicated columnist and author
of the book Straight Talk About the Information Superhighway.
He can be reached at reidgold@comcast.net
or http://www.reidgoldsborough.com.
|
|
|
|
