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123webguru News Desk
German Publishers Plan Challenge to Google Print
When the online retailer Amazon.com came calling a year ago to sign up German publishers for a digital indexing project, one book executive urged a strategy of polite rebuffs.
Then this year, when Google started wooing publishers to sign on for its own digital book project, that German executive, Matthias Ulmer, decided the time was ripe to seize control with a homegrown counterattack.
Now Mr. Ulmer and a five-member task force of the German book trade association Börsenverein are organizing their own digital indexing project, Volltextsuche Online. The effort of the 6,000-member association of booksellers and publishers comes in reaction to Google's plans, unveiled in December, to start digitizing books in the world, with the first step being major university library collections in the United States.
"We have to decide whether distribution is in the hands of a few global distributors and global publishing houses," said Mr. Ulmer, who heads Eugen Ulmer Verlag, a medium-size publishing house in Stuttgart. Publishers and booksellers that are involved, he said, "feel that if they don't do this today, they may no longer exist in some years."
The German project includes some publishing industry heavyweights like Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, a media group based in Stuttgart. But it still faces a test of membership reaction at a general assembly of the association on June 17 in Berlin. The trade association is not putting the idea to a vote but will essentially gather feedback.
Publishers are well aware of the resources of their rival, Google Print, which plans to offer free, searchable online copies of out-of-copyright books. But they are most concerned about its plans to also offer limited portions of newer books like the table of contents and excerpts. Amazon has already expanded its basic keyword searching techniques so that results display information from inside books.
Google's ambitious undertaking has created unease in France over the hegemony of the English language and has led to a European effort to organize an alternative library scanning initiative. The Association of American University Presses in the United States has also raised fears that the Google project could lead to massive copyright infringement.
Stefan Keuchel, a spokesman for Google Germany in Hamburg, said the German initiative and the French effort had turned into something of a political debate.
"There's been some misunderstanding and misconceptions about what Google is doing," he said, "so we are trying to be open for discussion with publishers. And so far, we've been seeing very high interest from German publishers who want to talk to us."
Mr. Ulmer, who is on the Börsenverein board, said most people in his group did not share the concerns about the Google project that emerged in France.
"Discussion is completely about titles still under copyright," Mr. Ulmer said, noting that Google claimed the right to digitize books through contracts with libraries and offered publishers and authors a chance to "opt out" of the database.
Mr. Ulmer said it was possible to offer the beginnings of a searchable database as early as this autumn by using existing decentralized servers of publishers and converting digital material to lower resolution files.
Since the trade organization started organizing its initiative after the Google project was announced, the reaction has varied among booksellers, who were largely positive, and publishers, who harbored some doubts about taking on such an ambitious project.
Rudiger Wischenbart, a Frankfurt-based cultural consultant and former communications director for the Frankfurt Book Fair, said many booksellers and publishers were simply frightened by the future.
"These publishers are just scared that they may lose control of their stuff but hardly have any positive strategy so far," Mr. Wischenbart said. "There are no e-visionaries among them."
Christian Sprang, legal counsel for Börsenverein, conceded that members had doubts about the new project because of potential costs and resources needed to achieve it. "It's quite a huge matter, and Google and Amazon are major players in the market," Mr. Sprang said.
Mr. Sprang said the organization had invited Google and Amazon to participate in the project and the general assembly to address booksellers and publishers for a panel discussion on the future of digital publishing. Mr. Keuchel of Google declined to comment on his company's plans for digitizing books in Germany. But in response to the trade association's invitation, he said Google already had plans under way in the United States for its own project.
Börsenverein's project would begin with newer, front-list titles dating back about five years, Mr. Ulmer said. He also said he envisioned the new system offering new ways of buying books in various forms.
For example, readers could buy a single chapter of a book, download a title for a short period or buy a mixture of chapters from different biographies of the same person.
"Of course, it's in the interest of Google and Amazon and the big publishers that this platform doesn't exist," Mr. Ulmer said. "But we have the power to make it happen."
News Source
http://www.nytimes.com
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