(Published in the Business Standard, June 1, 2010)
The fantasy of any Indian reader who’s travelled to countries with bigger and better bookstores is simple: we want to be able to buy the books we love when they come out.
Many great books, especially histories, biographies, science writing and world literature/ poetry/ drama in translation will never be stocked in Indian bookshops. Many will come in after six-eight months, or will be prohibitively expensive, or will be stocked in limited copies.
For readers, one way around this is to order online or invest in an e-reader, but that’s still restrictive—you lose out on the serendipity of browsing, the accidental happiness of stumbling across books you didn’t know you wanted. (And as reader Meethil Momayya pointed out in an email, e-books are still subject to territorial agreements.)
From that perspective, the amendments proposed to the Indian Copyright Act might seem like a great idea. The core principle underlying the amendments applies equally to the Internet, digital media, film and broadcasting, and print publishing. Open up the markets, allow books, films and other media to move freely across countries, and give the Indian consumer and reader a much wider choice. So why is Indian publishing unhappy about this, and how is the Indian Copyright Act set to change the way you read?
The publishing perspective: Thomas Abraham, CEO, Hachette India, is blunt: “This will change the face of Indian publishing completely, and disastrously. The worst hit will be the publishers.” His logic, echoed by HarperCollins’ P N Sukumar and Krishan Chopra, is simple. The Act would do away, in effect, with the idea of an Indian “territory”—allowing books to be freely imported, and in the worst case, dumped, in the Indian market. For publishers, the incentive to promote an author or invest in his work in India disappears—if you know that anyone can print and sell copies of the book your publishing house has worked to produce.
Most glaringly, the “open market” is not reciprocal: while US and UK printers could, theoretically, flood the Indian markets with reprints of popular books, copyright agreements in those territories still hold, and Indian publishing cannot do the same. In the long run, this could kill or seriously cripple Indian publishing.
The author’s perspective: While the initial response from authors on the easing of markets is bound to be positive, will they get paid? As happened with the music industry, authors might find that their sales and audiences rise—but they’re not getting royalties on those editions. In a worst-case scenario, if the Act goes through in its present form and the doomsayers are right, the apparent freedoms authors might gain from the easing of copyright restrictions would be offset by the loss of local publishing support. And again, as with the music industry, for authors to gain, they would have to be willing to create book groups, nurture audiences and do much of their spadework. None of this infrastructure exists in India at present.
The reader’s perspective: Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO of Westland, offers a balanced take. “This is terrible for publishers,” he says. “But readers and retail want more choice and this could offer them more freedom—even at the basic level of being able to buy different editions of the same book.”
The biggest question—unanswered because the Copyright Act is geared far more strongly to the needs of the digital and film worlds, than to the complex and competing needs of print—is how this will work in practice. This could be like the Chinese toy revolution: the insidious replacement of local Indian products with cheaper, more disposable alternatives. Many readers couldn’t care less, so long as they have more and better books to read.
But the other argument is blunt, if protectionist: if you want a thriving Indian publishing industry, flooding the market with cheaper editions of books will kill off the publisher’s incentive to support and nurture authors. This could work if markets were open in the other direction as well—if a reciprocal arrangement allowed Indian publishers to ship their editions of US and UK-produced books into those markets—but there is no way the US and the UK would allow that kind of competition.
Like most Indian readers, I want more choice, and better books; and I don’t want to have to wait months to buy my favourite authors. But however well-intentioned, if the practical implications of the Copyright Act would be to cripple local publishing, that’s bad for readers—and terrible for authors. What works for digital industries and films might have entirely the opposite effect on the publishing world, and it’s not a gamble Indian publishing can afford to lose.
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The BS Column: Should Google own the world's words?
(Published in the Business Standard, September 14, 2009. I ducked writing on Google Book Search for as long as I could--it's a complex issue, and if you're writing at this word length, you're not going to do more than reiterate the basic arguments--but finally had to put my two cents in. Oh well.)
Who owns literature? And would you be comfortable if the answer to that was: “Google”?
This is only a slight oversimplification, and it’s the key question in the ferocious debate raging currently over Google Book Search. In late 2004, Google kicked off the Google Print Library project. The search engine behemoth announced plans to partner with some of the world’s biggest libraries in order to digitize books.
Many of us saw this as a potentially good thing at the time, especially with regard to hard-to-find books, books that are out of copyright, or rare books that might not be easily accessible otherwise. A vast, worldwide, easily accessible electronic library is everyone’s Borgesian dream come true. But as early as 2005, fears surfaced that this might give Google too much power—and would the company be able to digitize books currently within copyright, or “orphan books” (books for which copyright is under dispute or hard to trace)?
By October 2008, Google had 20,000 partners in what was now known as the Google Book Search project—and had digitized over 7 million books. This sounds, again, like a good thing—the world’s largest library, the rescue and recovery of forgotten or lost books, perhaps even a shift in the power equation between authors. Instead of being biased, inevitably, towards books published in our current time and age (bookshops will carry far more recently published works than classic works), we gain access to the work of the human imagination down the centuries.
Here’s the catch. As the Google Books Search Settlement goes to court, one of the key issues at stake is whether Google will effectively own the world’s largest library. As author Cory Doctorow explains, thanks to an ill-judged class action settlement between the Authors Guild and Google Book Search, “Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books [including orphan books] in search results... The real risk is that Google could end up as the sole source of ultimate power in book discovery, distribution and sales. As the only legal place where all books can be searched, Google gets enormous market power: the structure of their search algorithm can make bestsellers or banish books to obscurity. The leverage they attain over publishing and authors through this settlement is incalculable.”
I like Google as a company. But do I trust them with this much power? Consider this, too: Google’s tools are fairly (if quietly) invasive. The reason why authors like Michael Chabon and Cory Doctorow are protesting this settlement before the hearing on October 7, and why several publishers have joined hands with them, is that Google Book Search has a dark side to it. Google’s system can monitor not just what books you buy, but what you search for, what you read, down to how much time you spend on a particular page. This may seem paranoid, but to give one company this much power when their databases also include tools on the lines of Google Maps and Gmail is insane.
That’s an awful lot of information that could be compiled in a way that is deeply invasive of your privacy. Imagine, for instance, that for excellent reasons, the courts might want the right to monitor the reading and online search habits of released paedophiles on probation. Google has that information. Should it assist the courts, especially if x paedophile’s probation officer suspects that he may be about to commit another crime? Now imagine a slightly different scenario, where you’ve fallen foul of say, an IT official in India, and he decides to ask Google for your reading records, discovers a lot of searches for erotica, and had you prosecuted under anti-porn laws.
These are simplistic examples, but there is a chilling effect to giving one company this much access and control over your personal information. And there’s a very human factor to be considered here: most people object to invasions of their privacy—but they object a lot less when that invasion is discreet and almost imperceptible. If Google Book Search was to come into our homes every week and demand to see our reading lists, as well as install security cameras to monitor exactly what we read, we would protest. But this is an online, invisible invasion. There aren’t going to be that many protests.
Google argues that the project is intrinsically good, and points to their reasonably strong track record at respecting the privacy of individuals—except in China. But I’m not comfortable with the idea, as a reader, of giving one company that much control over my life—and no, Google’s Privacy Policy isn’t enough of a reason to trust them. Add the invasion of privacy issues to the massively large database of literature that would now be in Google’s hands, and you have a big problem. The world may still need and use a digitized library. But there are very good reasons not to hand over the keys to that library to one company. Even if it is Google.
Who owns literature? And would you be comfortable if the answer to that was: “Google”?
This is only a slight oversimplification, and it’s the key question in the ferocious debate raging currently over Google Book Search. In late 2004, Google kicked off the Google Print Library project. The search engine behemoth announced plans to partner with some of the world’s biggest libraries in order to digitize books.
Many of us saw this as a potentially good thing at the time, especially with regard to hard-to-find books, books that are out of copyright, or rare books that might not be easily accessible otherwise. A vast, worldwide, easily accessible electronic library is everyone’s Borgesian dream come true. But as early as 2005, fears surfaced that this might give Google too much power—and would the company be able to digitize books currently within copyright, or “orphan books” (books for which copyright is under dispute or hard to trace)?
By October 2008, Google had 20,000 partners in what was now known as the Google Book Search project—and had digitized over 7 million books. This sounds, again, like a good thing—the world’s largest library, the rescue and recovery of forgotten or lost books, perhaps even a shift in the power equation between authors. Instead of being biased, inevitably, towards books published in our current time and age (bookshops will carry far more recently published works than classic works), we gain access to the work of the human imagination down the centuries.
Here’s the catch. As the Google Books Search Settlement goes to court, one of the key issues at stake is whether Google will effectively own the world’s largest library. As author Cory Doctorow explains, thanks to an ill-judged class action settlement between the Authors Guild and Google Book Search, “Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books [including orphan books] in search results... The real risk is that Google could end up as the sole source of ultimate power in book discovery, distribution and sales. As the only legal place where all books can be searched, Google gets enormous market power: the structure of their search algorithm can make bestsellers or banish books to obscurity. The leverage they attain over publishing and authors through this settlement is incalculable.”
I like Google as a company. But do I trust them with this much power? Consider this, too: Google’s tools are fairly (if quietly) invasive. The reason why authors like Michael Chabon and Cory Doctorow are protesting this settlement before the hearing on October 7, and why several publishers have joined hands with them, is that Google Book Search has a dark side to it. Google’s system can monitor not just what books you buy, but what you search for, what you read, down to how much time you spend on a particular page. This may seem paranoid, but to give one company this much power when their databases also include tools on the lines of Google Maps and Gmail is insane.
That’s an awful lot of information that could be compiled in a way that is deeply invasive of your privacy. Imagine, for instance, that for excellent reasons, the courts might want the right to monitor the reading and online search habits of released paedophiles on probation. Google has that information. Should it assist the courts, especially if x paedophile’s probation officer suspects that he may be about to commit another crime? Now imagine a slightly different scenario, where you’ve fallen foul of say, an IT official in India, and he decides to ask Google for your reading records, discovers a lot of searches for erotica, and had you prosecuted under anti-porn laws.
These are simplistic examples, but there is a chilling effect to giving one company this much access and control over your personal information. And there’s a very human factor to be considered here: most people object to invasions of their privacy—but they object a lot less when that invasion is discreet and almost imperceptible. If Google Book Search was to come into our homes every week and demand to see our reading lists, as well as install security cameras to monitor exactly what we read, we would protest. But this is an online, invisible invasion. There aren’t going to be that many protests.
Google argues that the project is intrinsically good, and points to their reasonably strong track record at respecting the privacy of individuals—except in China. But I’m not comfortable with the idea, as a reader, of giving one company that much control over my life—and no, Google’s Privacy Policy isn’t enough of a reason to trust them. Add the invasion of privacy issues to the massively large database of literature that would now be in Google’s hands, and you have a big problem. The world may still need and use a digitized library. But there are very good reasons not to hand over the keys to that library to one company. Even if it is Google.
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