[Most interesting tidbit in this article: 80% of books still under copyright are orphans--they are no longer in print or the rights holder cannot be located. Wow! That is a much higher percentage than I had imagined.]
MARCH 11, 2010 In Europe, Book-Scanning Efforts Feel Their Way Into New Territory By MAX COLCHESTER And CHRISTOPHER EMSDEN Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541304575099943467728882.html?mod=WSJ_hp_editorsPicks While a legal settlement for Google Inc. to distribute millions of books online in the U.S. remains in limbo, book digitizing is moving ahead in different places in Europe under several experimental programs. On Wednesday, Google announced that it will scan ancient Italian texts ranging from Galileo Galilei to herbal medicine manuals as part of the Internet company's first publishing partnership with a national government. The deal involves digitizing up to one million books held in the national libraries in Rome and Florence. Google has similar arrangements for out-of-copyright books with Oxford University, Madrid's Complutense University and the Bavarian state museum, but Wednesday marked a "groundbreaking" deal with a national government, according to Nikesh Arora, Google's president of global sales operations and business development. Meanwhile, in Norway, the national library last year signed a deal with a group representing all of the Scandinavian country's publishers and authors to put 50,000 copyrighted books online that can be read for free. The scanned books can be read only on computers screens in Norway and cannot be downloaded or printed out. Norway's pilot project, called Bookshelf, could eventually lead Norway to make all of the two million books in its national library available online. The project is being studied by other libraries across Europe, including the British National Library. For years, Europe's public libraries have wrestled with publishers over how to digitize book collections so readers could access books online without infringing on copyright laws. At the same time, European publishers, like their U.S. counterparts, have been trying to figure out ways to make money from online books, in particular those that are out of print. Norway's project tries to bring the two sides together to speed up the process. Key to the effort was a change in Norwegian copyright law allowing Norwegian authors and publishers to negotiate the online reproduction of their printed works stored in libraries, museums and national archives as a group, rather than individually. Before the change, the biggest impediment to digitizing huge collections of books was that it took years for the National Library to sign individual copyright deals for online publications with myriad publishing houses. Book digitalization efforts in the U.S. have generally followed a different path. In the U.S, Google has sought to create a giant online library by scanning books en masse and then publishing extracts, or snippets, online. These snippets are published under the principle of "fair use," a body of laws that allows reproduction of a particular work under certain limited circumstances, for example for educational purposes or literary criticism. Once a work is online, the copyright holder may request to be paid or have the work removed from Google's Web site. Norway's solution has been to create one organization that represents all the publishers and authors across the country. In Norway, this umbrella organization that participated in the pilot project is called Kopinor and it includes 22 authors' and publishers' associations. About 25,000 of the country's publishers and authors—the vast majority— have agreed to be represented by Kopinor. Any deal Kopinor signs automatically applies to all of Norway's publishers and authors, whether they are members of Kopinor or not. If an author subsequently objects to a book being put online, he or she is allowed to remove the books. The Bookshelf project, which will last until 2011, will cost around $900,000 a year in licensing fees alone. Norway will foot the bill. Some Norwegian publishers worry that the licensing deal could hurt their own efforts at digitizing books through private collections that readers pay to read online. They also worry it could hurt their shop sales. "This is not a future business model for publishers," says Per Christian Opsahl, the chief executive officer of the Norwegian Publishers Association. "The sums involved are small and the payback should be larger." Arne Magnus, director of Aschehoug & Co, one of Norway's oldest publishing houses, calls the project "an interesting alternative to Google" but says he probably won't ever allow all of his books to be put online, just older ones that are no longer available in book shops. So far, 80 authors have asked Kopinor to remove their books from the National Library's online database. The library pays Kopinor an annual fee equivalent to nine U.S. cents per page made available on its Web site. Kopinor then distributes the money to the publishers and authors. Yngve Slettholm, the executive director of Kopinor, says the deal is a boon for publishers. "The vast majority of books are out of print and can be considered commercially dead," he says. "This creates an extra source of revenue for older books." For the Italian project, Google will assume the costs of the effort and will perform the scanning work in Italy. It currently costs 30 European cents a page to digitize books, says Antonia Ida Fontana, director of the National Library in Florence, but Mr. Arora says the cost would be considerably less due to Google's scanning technology. The European Commission is trying to resolve the issue of publishing books online that are still protected by copyright, but have gone out of print, or their owners cannot be identified. Such orphan works, as the books are known, amount to about 80% of all books still in copyright. The commission, which has its own online book publishing project called Europeana, hopes quick action on copyright rules will give Europe an edge over the U.S. solution where Google is negotiating a copyright settlement directly with publishers. Google has around 12 million books scanned in its library venture, of which two million are in the public domain and free from copyright strictures. Of the latter, about 35% of the books are consulted each month, Mr. Arora says. Of the copyright-protected books, which Google has digitized in partnerships with some 30,000 publishers around the world, the consultation rate is around 80%, he says. -- ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 Mail: antunes at uh dot edu _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
