Op-Ed: Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft plan lawsuit against Google books deal

Google’s major competitors have foreshadowed an antitrust class action against Google Books settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The settlement cleared the way for Google to digitize millions of books.

The proposed action as described by The New York Times looks more like defensive desperation and lack of commercial ideas than purely altruistic zeal. Commercially, this is a straight flush for Google, yes, but that situation has been created by the comatose nature of the publishing industry, which has leaped into digitization with all the enthusiasm of a reluctant fossil looking for a museum. Antiquity has caught up with this dinosaur. There are some real issues beyond the antitrust concept, not least of which is blocking the evolution of new publishing scenarios and methodologies. Print, whether anyone likes it or not, is history. It’s inefficient, uneconomical, and readers are being gouged on a routine basis for pitiful quality products. The average paperback’s paper wouldn’t qualify as toilet paper, and print and proof standards are on the wrong side of abysmal. Given that most of these products are also now derived from digital formats, there’s no real excuse for this situation. Gutenberg produced better quality product than most modern publishers using woodcuts. Consumers don’t buy product value, they buy the overheads of this hopelessly outdated methodology. There’s also some applied stupidity leaving a delightful stench in some of the rhetorical exercises. Amazon, the colossus of the book industry, has been pushing its own digital format, Kindle, for some time, and has been having trouble keeping up with demand for its readers. Amazon, ironically, would also be the prime beneficiary of a vast increase in digitization of books. Hard copy book sales would naturally fall off, but that’s going to happen anyway. Amazon is actually sitting on the likely descendant of the book. Primitive as Kindle is, with its ridiculous monotone color schematics and sub-browser level sophistication, as readers go, it’s in the box seat. So is Amazon looking at a short term sales scenario, or the future of its own technology? Then there’s the market forces issues. Microsoft and Yahoo don’t seem to have any particular stake in the digital books market. Microsoft, however, has shown a tendency to invade markets with its own brands. A move into the digital books area would be a natural option for Microsoft. Google’s move may have preempted a Microsoft strategy. That would explain the apparent enthusiasm for contesting a case in which it doesn’t have an obvious stake. The anti Google ideology, coming from former market leaders displaced by Google, is rather sad. These were the big guys, pre Google. They’ve now become purely reactive, running for lawyers, when they should be running for new products and being more competitive themselves. Can you sue people for not being competitive? Why not? There’s one very important quote from The New York Times link above:

The parties in the settlement have hailed it as a huge public good, arguing that the agreement will make millions of out-of-print books widely available online and in libraries across the country. They have said it will also create new ways for millions of authors to make money from digital copies of their books, and that other companies could secure deals similar to the one Google obtained under the settlement.

Note the bit about “out of print” books. Readers, in addition to their charitable work supporting lousy inventory policies from every publisher on Earth, have to scour the world, literally, to find books. (Print on Demand has been around for years. What’s so damn difficult about keeping a master digital copy for orders?) Digitization can solve that grim problem, which I’ve had myself in trying to find references for my own books. Note also the comment about “similar deals”. There’s nothing to stop anyone doing the same thing Google’s doing. So what’s the fuss about? Should Pampers be notified? Wake up, fools. This is likely to be more of a lawyer-breeding exercise than anything else. Digitization can’t be stopped by class actions.