AAP: Call Me Maybe « PWxyz

"Almost seven years ago to the day that the five of the largest publishers in the world filed a suit in a U.S. district court against Google, the AAP and Google announced that the parties have agreed to settle their litigation. Although publishing announcements seem tethered to the penumbra of the Frankfurt Book Fair, this is not “stop the presses” material: the publishers have been negotiating with Google for some time, even while the Authors Guild determinedly presses their class action engagement. But what is surprising, perhaps, is that so little has been apparently achieved by the publishers through these long years of uncertainty. Publishers are left to opt-out of Google’s library-obtained dataset, and can now participate in commercializing older titles that Google has never ceased digitizing both in the U.S. and abroad, even if the rate of library digitization may be slowing... Indeed, it may be that we have seen one of the last set of necessary rapprochements between publishers and technology companies. In the last few months, we’ve seen coordinated agency pricing aimed at Amazon fail; the Department of Justice intervention against Apple in the same case move forwards even while several of the implicated publishers fold their cards and accept a settlement which requires them to pay reparations to their customers; and GBS – a long-running effort to frustrate the digitization of heretofore commercially abandoned books – dropped by the corner of the road like a plagiarized novel... Globalized consumerism has surely swayed publishers that being part of the game – integrating as many books as possible into the media decks of Android and iOS tablets and mobiles – is a necessity ... The tally is intriguing. Publishers reassert the ability to form contracts over books for which they claim digital rights, thereby catching up with the French, who signed a similar agreement in June. Works with contested or uncertain rightsholding claims, unclaimed books, and orphan books remain frozen out of anything but discovery through search, presumably. The friction between publishers and artists has regained striking clarity as the Authors Guild continues to declaim that their rights have been indelicately infringed. Yet, with publishers demonstrating that contractual relationships can be attractive for backlist titles, it wouldn’t be surprising for splinter authors to emerge from the AG cocoon, seeking a marketplace precedent for their own rights. Because publishers are pulling out of litigation a large number of books they now see as assets in an investment partnership, the settlement debilitates the Authors Guild claim that they represent a uniform class with self-similar interests over a comprehensive set of titles.  Some commentators have noted that in addition to any financial compensation for their pain and trouble, publishers receive a digital copy of books they keep in play with Google. The value of that gift is open to debate. First, authors may dispute such a distribution. Second, technical characteristics of these files may limit their utility. Library books are digitized through non-destructive scanning, which means their pages are photographed and then processed through image and optical character recognition software. The results can be reasonably accurate for post-WWII era books that have uniform fonts and structure, but they are not the kind of product that is likely to be placed on a retailer’s top shelf alongside contemporary e-books. Having access to the full-text – if publishers get more than image files – means they can provide books to others for the enhancement of search, semantic mining, and other discoverability features. But as an straight shot to having ready-to-roll EPUBs, well, that they ain’t.  At the end of the day, the publisher litigation with Google feels like the remnant of a bad dream fading in the early morning hours..."