|
Fwd: ZDNet UK: Authors may challenge Amazon full-text search
|
Iain D. Brown
|
Oct 30, 2003 01:50 PST
|
I stumbled across this story on ZDNET UK.--IDB.
Forwarded message
-----------------
From: Iain Brown, ia-@iainbrown.net
To: edline--@electriceditors.net
-----------------------------------------------------------------
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651,39117410,00.htm
Authors may challenge Amazon full-text search
Matthew Broersma
The Authors Guild, a professional organisation representing US
writers, is recommending that some authors block their works from
appearing on Amazon.com's new full-text search tool.
In an email alert to members, sent on Friday, the Guild argued
the tool could eat into sales of certain types of books,
including cookbooks and reference texts, and advised that some
authors might do well to have their books removed from the
service. Controversially, the group argues that publishers'
contracts don't entitle them to take part in the service without
the author's permission.
The service, dubbed "Search inside the book", lets users type in
any keyword and receive results for all the pages and titles of
various books that contain that term. In the past, Amazon
customers could search only by author name, title or keyword. The
search feature works with around 120,000 titles from 190
publishers, which translates into some 33 million pages of
searchable text.
The service, launched as a partnership with the publishers that
are displaying the titles, has been combined with the site's
standard search.
The Guild said that while the tool could benefit older titles and
those that don't receive a great deal of attention, the value of
other books would be eroded. "Most reference books would be at
clear risk in such a database," the Guild advised. "So would many
(if not most) travel books and cookbooks."
Part of the problem is that the search tool doesn't place strict
enough limits upon what users can see, the organisation said. "It
turns out that it's quite simple (though a bit inconvenient) to
look at 100 or more consecutive pages from a single lengthy
book," the group said. "So a reader could choose to print out all
the fish recipes from a cookbook in the programme. Or the section
on Tuscany from a travel book."
Determined college students could print hundreds of pages from
textbooks, the Guild warned.
Publishers need an author's consent to place a book on the
service, the Guild argued, although the publishers don't agree.
"Most argued with our interpretation of their contract (no
surprise there), but some have said that they would remove a work
from the programme if the author insisted," the Guild said.
CNET News.com's Dinesh C. Sharma contributed to this report.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
ZDNet News: The UK's best source for computing news - updated
throughout the day. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/
Copyright © 2003 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CNET Networks, Inc.
ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CNET NETWORKS, Inc.
|
|
 |
|
