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Even Google Books couldn't pull that off. Publishers believe, maybe correctly, that a youtube for books would destroy their business.
by saint_fiasco 9y ago
Even Google Books couldn't pull that off. Publishers believe, maybe correctly, that a youtube for books would destroy their business.
- ericd 9y agoYou might be interested to read about what happened with that, I was pretty surprised when I read the full story. Basically, publishers started off by suing Google, until they realized that it would probably generate a lot of new revenue for sales on books that were out of print, and that weren't currently generating money. With that in mind, they continued in their lawsuit, but started trying to use the lawsuit as a way to help Google instead of stop them - by using the mechanics of the class action suit, they could default opt in all authors, with the onus being on the authors to opt out, and then they would settle with Google for a nominal amount, thereby getting the permission of all the authors of those out of print works to be included in Google Books without going through the nearly impossible task of getting each author's explicit permission to participate. This was looking like a great legal hack until Amazon and Microsoft complained to the Federal government (the FTC IIRC) that it would be unfair if this was allowed to happen, because only Google would get this permission. So, counterintuitively, it wasn't really the publishers that stopped Google Books.