U of Michigan and Amazon To Offer 400,000 OOP Books 160
eldavojohn writes "Four hundred thousand rare, out of print books may soon be available for purchase ranging anywhere from $10 to $45 apiece. The article lists a rare Florence Nightingale book on Nursing which normally sells for thousands due to its rarity. The [University of Michigan] librarian, Mr. Courant said, 'The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitised. We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library.' The University of Michigan has a library where Google is scanning rare books and was the aim of heavy criticism. (Some of the Google-scanned books are to be sold on Amazon.) How the authors guild and publishers react to Amazon's Surge offering softcover reprints of out of print books remains to be seen."
And the Kindle? (Score:4, Insightful)
We've been pushing to go from Paper to Digital. It's interesting that they're going in the opposite direction here. The article has no mention of the Kindle. I find it hard to believe that the Kindle doesn't play some big role in this. Perhaps they will offer these books for free on the Kindle to help push the device? Personally, I think they should be online and free.
Re:And the Kindle? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Public domain trampled on again (Score:5, Insightful)
They are offering you the chance to PURCHASE their labor spent scanning the books.
And as soon as someone decides to type up the contents of one of the books and put it online, what happens to their business model then? Or are they going to claim, like a certain museum in the UK, that although the copyright on the original work has expired, the copyright on their "scans" is brand new?
This is a dangerous idea, because it will either cost Amazon money since they won't be able to maintain their business model on expired works, or (the most likely scenario) the public domain will lose once again as courts end up deciding that this is a valid method to perpetuate copyright for all time, by making copies of your work the night before copyright expires.
Re:Public domain trampled on again (Score:3, Insightful)
The Count of Monte Cristo is in the public domain but if I want a dead tree version of it I have to be able to find a dead tree version of it and then generally will need to purchase that dead tree version.
Now finding a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo is rather easy. Imagine trying to find a copy of something that is technically in the public domain but the book itself is rare enough to effectively not exist anymore (and there are no electronic copies of it) and the market so small that no one would bother trying to republish it even if they had the book to work from. Print On Demand is a perfect solution to that problem. You don't have to keep stock of books that will rarely sell but yet you can make those books available to for purchase.
Re:Public domain trampled on again (Score:3, Insightful)
Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org]?
Re:Public domain trampled on again (Score:1, Insightful)
If you own a hard copy of a public domain book, you can scan it and put it online... These are rare books that it seems Amazon is going through the trouble of finding copies and scanning them.
Just because something is owned by the public doesnt mean that you shouldn't have to pay for it if there is some sort of service rendered to make it available to the masses.
Re:Technically in the Public Domain But, (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, I disagree!
They own the scan. They made it. But, I disagree that the scan is copywritable. It is not an original artistic work. It might be if it was a subsequently "cleaned up" version of the original, that was being re-released. Same, if it was OCR'd, but the issue would hinge on whether the OCRing was "merely transformative". Then, it would not be copyrightable.
Of course, if you got their "only" scan in an illegal manner, and made copies of that, you might have committed the crime of theft, regrdless of copyright infringement. You might not have violated copyright, but you would have violated a proprty right -- taking without permission.
Finally, in this case, I don't think it's the content that has value, but rather the manuscript, who's value is not diminished (and might, in fact be enhanced, if it's content proved popular). We can all get copies of Shakespeare's works, or a print of the Mona Lisa, and that does not diminish the value of an original manuscript, does it?
Re:Technically in the Public Domain But, (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds silly and convoluted, but this is the kind of argument we can expect to see as information becomes easy to control and manipulate.
No, this is what you get for treating information as property. Maybe the law needs to get in sync with reality once in a while.
You can go on and on about how it costs money to create information in whatever form, but as long as it's free to replicate it (since the devices needed are common household items now), you need a different business model other than selling it. I'm generalizing here because it doesn't just apply to literature. Think software, music, movies, etc. That's the beauty of computers: all information can be represented as a sequence of bits, and as such, easily copied and modified. Add in the fact that most people don't have a moral problem with copying, and you have laws that are impossible to uphold without a police state.
Oh, and let's not go into the finer points, like what happens when I write a program, and the compiler output played as audio happens to be a copyrighted song.
Public Domain != Non-commercial (Score:3, Insightful)
not a new thing (Score:3, Insightful)
My partner has ordered a few facsimile reprints of 17th century theological and philosophical works from Kessinger Publishing, works she wasn't able to get anywhere else. They're just poor facsimiles, almost photocopies, of old works, but even then manage to work in a little incompetence. Their printing of Sir Kenelm Digby's Of Bodies and of Man's Soul to Discover the Immortality of Reasonable Souls has on its cover (and as the title on the Amazon page!) one of the best editorial screw-ups ever [amazon.com].
Re:Tried and True (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not a problem of old==good and new==bad. Start from the assumption that 95% of everything is crap. 95% of the books that were written 400 years ago were crap. However, only the good ones have survived. This gives the impression that older stuff is better, but this is a mistaken impression.
On the other hand, much of the good and valuable stuff from the past is very hard to get ahold of. There are people that would really love to have a copy of Addington's guide to illustrating flaked stone artifacts [amazon.com], but they are difficult to find, as the book has been out of print for years (and is not into the public domain to boot), and those of us that own copies of the book are not likely to give them up. If Amazon wants to get the rights to the book and print off copies on demand, I would be happy to pay them for the service. As I see it, Amazon is attempting to fill a niche. Sure, they make money off of it, but I don't see it as a simple marketing ploy designed to capitalize off of nostalgia for the past.
Re:I don't have a problem as long as... (Score:1, Insightful)
I've seen the idea of buying and then copying and republishing, but is this really a risk for Google/Amazon? For simplicity, let's assume that the individual copying the book can type 100 words a minute, and that there are 1000 words per page, then for a 500 page book, you are looking at 5000 minutes or about 2 work weeks worth of effort for one book. Even at minimum wage, you are looking at $500/per book and likely to have a higher error rate than the Google/Amazon version. To break even then, he/she must resell something on the order of 40-80 ebook copies. Even on a volunteer basis, you'd have to distribute 40-80 ebook copies to make it worthwhile, and this is as a marginal player rather than an industry leader. I suspect that some of the reprints will sell well, with a good number being ones that Amazon/Google would be happy to sell 100 of. Actually where the two will reap in profits is if they can convince universities to order on demand books rather than inter-library loan. Think about it, libraries can pay shipping for a requested book or buy their own on-demand edition and get one to keep for probably 3x more (2x if they set up an on-demand printer in libraries). Actually if Journals picked up on that, you could end up printing your own physical journal on site and have them nicely bound to start rather than rebinding multiple issues.
Re:Public domain trampled on again (Score:4, Insightful)
It will work. The options are 1) spend $10 on Amazon to get a bound copy in the mail, 2) download a copy online and spend $10 printing it at home before stapling it together, and 3) go the Ann Arbor and maybe get access to the only remaining copy of the book at be forced to read it under supervision in a clean room.
I know which one I would choose.