Another author considers Amazon's book search feature [ip]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 11:19:19 -0500
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
From: Stephen Cobb <scobb () cobb com>
Subject: Re: [Politech] Doug Isenberg on Amazon.com's "Search Inside
  the Book" feature
In-Reply-To: <6.0.0.22.2.20031113003206.021c4e20 () mail well com>

Declan

Thanks for alerting me to Doug's excellent article. As someone else whose 
writings are now globally published without remuneration via Amazon's 
"Search Inside the Book" feature, I have some comments (none of which are 
meant to be critical of Doug, who has done us all a favor by articulating 
the complex issues this feature has raised).

My basic point is that this new search feature has very little to do with 
book sales.

Doug wrote: "Obviously, Amazon must have thought the feature would drive 
sales, since it makes money not from searching but from selling."

I disagree. Amazon makes money from book searches (it also sells a lot more 
than books). When you search for a book, you may get more than a dozen 
adverts/links to related and unrelated products, none of which are books 
and only some of which are sold by Amazon.

Amazon has figured that someone researching carpentry books might also be 
ripe for a power tool pitch (and you can buy the tool from Amazon). But a 
search for network security books would be a good way to sell ads for 
firewalls (not from Amazon but from a vendor who pays Amazon to appear in 
those results).

But you also get unrelated stuff like the advert for Nordstroms I got when 
I viewed the listing for my wife's book, Network Security for Dummies, 
which is downright spooky, as she likes to shop there.

You can bet that Nordstrom is paying to be there, so the ability to search 
for books is creating revenue.  Right now I don't see similar ads on the 
'Search Inside' pages, but I would bet 10 free copies of my latest book 
that the plan calls for this eventually (the growth of ads on the regular 
book search pages has been slow and incremental, as though that makes it 
acceptable--which I guess it does if nobody but me objects).

Doug wrote: And the publishers who signed up with Amazon must have thought 
the same thing.
Unfortunately, my experience of large publishers is that they rarely 'get' 
new technology (a great MBA thesis would be "How publishers lose billions 
with bad technology choices"). The publishers probably bought the idea that 
"this sells more books."

The point here, as Doug suggests, is "Whose books?" As the Authors Guild 
said in its alert to members about "Search Inside the Book," the effect 
will vary greatly according to the type of book.

If I was Dennis Lehane (and reading his brilliant prose in 'Mystic River' 
makes me wish I was) I would not be worried. Very few people will read the 
book online to dodge the $4.79 special offer price. I bet more people are 
likely to buy novels if they can read a few pages and find they enjoy the 
style.

But what about books like the $80 classic 'Computer Security Handbook'? 
This is not a cover-to-cover read and I am pretty sure sales will decline 
now that it is a free and freely searchable online reference. To be honest, 
as someone who teaches a university course from this book, I now find it 
more convenient to use the new Amazon digital version than the analogue one 
I have on my desk.

And this is where, as my colleague, Ray Everett-Church, has pointed out, 
the Amazon impact may be most severe: electronic versions. Where is the 
market for an ebook version when there is already a free one on Amazon?

Which brings us back to the legal issues, and "the effect of the use upon 
the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work." Clearly it is 
not adequate to assess this on a single unsubstantiated claim (Amazon says 
"In the first five days, sales growth for titles included in Search Inside 
the Book outpaced growth for titles not in the program by 9 percent"). 
There are three factors missing here:

1. Actual sales impact on specific titles (I doubt sales of every 
searchable book went up)

2. Potential market impact (an ebook may now be hard to sell).

3. Perceived value (it will be hard to get people to pay $80 for a book 
that is 'free' online, and BTW, nobody is getting rich off $80 for 1200 pages).

Finally, and this may be a surprise given what I have just said, I think 
the long term effect of the Amazon Search Inside feature may be a complete 
re-evaluation of the value of publishing. There are over a million books 
out there with my name on (assuming those that I wrote in the 80s have not 
been thrown away) but what those books earned in royalties ended up being a 
lot less than they contributed to my earning potential as a professional.

So it may make more sense for authors to skip the whole 
publisher-bookseller-Amazon process and make their work available for free. 
At least that way authors can decide what ads, if any, appear when people 
look at their books, and spike potential exploitation of their work by 
online superstores.

Stephen
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