Book publishers are fighting back in the ongoing Google Bookscanning Wars.
Publishers who want to make their books searchable online but aren't comfortable with Google Book Search now have another option.
Publisher HarperCollins and Austin, Texas-based LibreDigital announced today a hosted service called LibreDigital Warehouse that will give publishers and booksellers the ability to deliver searchable book content on their own Web sites.
Like Google Book Search, the service will allow users to search the entire content of a book and preview a percentage of its text and illustrations.
Unlike Google, LibreDigital Warehouse allows publishers to customize which pages a user can view, which pages are always prohibited from viewing (such as the last three pages of a novel), and what overall percentage of a book is viewable. Publishers can customize these rules per title and per partner.
The service is the first to allow publishers to digitally capture and deliver book content in a controlled context online, according to LibreDigital.
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Google, for its part, maintains that it respects publisher copyright. Google Book Search, still in beta, reveals "snippets" of text when a user searches for books. If a book is not under copyright, Google allows users to view the entire book.
Google declined to comment for this article.
"The ability for people to easily search an entire book's content and preview chapters online before they buy it, brings the experience of traditional casual book shopping to the Web," said Brian Murray, Group President, HarperCollins Publishers. "We believe LibreDigital's service is an important tool for helping our authors, distributors and independent booksellers better market and sell titles on the Web, while giving us control over the permissions and presentation quality of copyrighted material."
The unique LibreDigital Warehouse service enables book publishers to display valuable content online in a high-quality, highly-searchable format, while maintaining tight controls over digital rights and permissions. As part of the service, LibreDigital can securely and easily digitize book content, make the content viewable on websites anywhere in the world, and directly interface with search engines and online booksellers. Features offered by LibreDigital include content digitization, asset ingest, automated tagging, digital rights management, digital content display, search, and page view control.
After digitizing a book's content using LibreDigital technology, publishers can provide their distributors and consumers a way to search and virtually preview book content online. For publishers, the new service offers a better way to meet the increasing digital demands of Internet consumers, while also helping book sellers of all sizes to improve their book marketing capabilities and protect the valuable copyrighted works of today's leading authors.
"The world of bringing book content online is here to stay," said Craig A. Miller, General Manager of LibreDigital. "The work we're doing today is a big step in helping the industry find a balance between making book content easily accessible, while ensuring that literary copyrights of authors are adequately protected."
In other words, HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman isn't going to sit idly by while Google runs off with her authors' intellectual property. Let's hope the other publishers follow suit and join LibreDigital. That way, the authors will get paid. And believe us, they need the money.
