I came to be a believer in copyright as a result of a lifetime spent around the publishing industry, an industry that couldn't exist without copryight. So I was pleased to see this item by Rachel Deahl in Publisher's Weekly (subscription required):

The Association of American Publishers' fight to preserve copyright in the digital era as well as how the organization can battle illiteracy were the dominant themes of AAP president Pat Schroeder's speech yesterday before the Publishers Advertising and Marketing Association's January lunch. Noting that she didn't take over the AAP "to watch the demise of publishing," Schroeder spoke candidly about the AAP's lawsuit against Google—it has sued the search engine for adding copyrighted books to its Google Library project without the permission of authors or publishers—and the importance of making sure content creators are included in profit models as publishing moves more and more to the Web. "It's a very serious time as we look at the digital environment we're in," she noted.

Schroeder is right. As a Wall Street Journal story by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg last week noted, HarperCollins has purchased an equity stake in NewsStand, a company that digitizes books. HarperCollins has already digitized 12,000 of its books, with 2,000 already online, and plans to do many more. It also is offering the digitizing services of NewsStand to other publishers. Simon & Schuster, Random House and Hyperion also are moving aggressively into digitization of their works, both new and backlist, according to the article.

New technologies are coming along that are making digitized books more appealing to consumers. It's inevitable that eventually digital books will be as common as digital songs, movies or video games. We want these publishers to find workable business models online, so that they will be able to continue to take chances on new authors without a publishing track record. We don't want books to become commodotized like toilet paper, and let parties with no commercial link to the authors or publishers digitizing books themselves for their own financial gain.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 12:47 PM | Books

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