Books: The Next File-Sharing Frontier?

So Microsoft (MSFT) is winding down its book digitization and search project (and its related academic research project) because it wants to focus on verticals that have a “high commercial intent.” In other words, there’s no money in book scanning. That presumably leaves Google (GOOG) to scan and index all of the world’s knowledge — and to fight the forces of copyright who believe the company’s project is in defiance of the laws covering fair use. Google doesn’t appear to mind (or at least not yet) that book scanning doesn’t produce any revenue. Farhad Manjoo at Salon says this is a classic example of Microsoft’s failure of imagination.

Speaking of imagination, it doesn’t take all that much to see that books are only a few steps away from joining music and movies (and software) as freely pirated content. E-books are already available, of course, but there aren’t that many of them yet — in part because there aren’t that many people using e-book readers. The Kindle could change that, however, as well as new readers that are coming with e-ink displays and low power requirements. But it was a comment on the TechCrunch post about Microsoft’s decision that got me thinking.

The comment mentioned a company called Atiz.com, which makes a relatively cheap version of a book scanning machine. It costs $1,600 — and that doesn’t include the cameras — but that’s orders of magnitude cheaper than the kinds of machines Microsoft uses, which cost as much as $100,000 each. And then I thought about how much university students like my daughter pay for the textbooks they use in school each year, which can cost upwards of $100 per book for something they may only use a few pages of for a particular class.

I think if I were an enterprising — and not especially law-abiding — student at a university, I might just buy a couple of those Atiz machines and a few cheap digital cameras, and start scanning textbooks as fast as I possibly could. If you build up a large enough respository of texts, you could start selling them page by page to students, or just let them swap the files on a p2p network. It would be illegal, of course — but no more or less illegal than Napster. And if a student only used excerpts from the books, the principle of fair use might still apply. Not that I’m suggesting anyone do such a thing, of course.

Update:

Speaking of giving books away for free, author Steven Poole did just that with a recent novel he wrote, but says he wasn’t at all impressed with the results. His experience prompted New York Times writer David Pogue to write about his own experiences with book piracy. But as usual, Techdirt writer Mike Masnick (who was kind enough to come and do a presentation last week at mesh 2008 on “the economics of abundance”) takes the argument used by both men apart piece by piece.

Comments

[MarcelMcSweeney]

"Microsoft’s failure of imagination" Maybe Microsoft moved their money and talent to projects you cannot even imagine.

[Whisper OnThe Wind]

MSFT might have discovered a color to replace the Blue Screen of Death, which they still have not conquered.

[ChristopherKata]

Hi Mathew!
The interesting part of the Microsoft story is not that they are getting out of the book scanning business, but rather that they were contributing to open service (on the order of millions of dollars) which was contributing scanned books to the Internet Archive. In fact MS allowed the Internet Archive to keep the scanners in place continue on with the work. So in fact, the service has not gone away but rather has simply suffered a drop in funding to continue with the work.

Google's option is not open - it's a closed system that can only be accessed through Google's search engine.

Microsoft's initiative through the Internet Archive is a far better, more open solution that likely will one day become funded by the public just as libraries are today. While the scanning technology is a little more expensive than off the shelf scanners, the service wrote their own software that transfers the scans to the central servers for processing and only costs $0.10 / page (roughly $30 per book) to execute. That's cheaper than a physical library and reaches far more people.

So I for one am hoping that the Internet Archive is able to replace the funds that MS was contributing to the initiative so that it does not fold.

[Gio]

Speaking about giving away books for free, Brazilina author Paulo Coelho has done just that with great success. Here is an article with video: torrentfreak.com/alche.../