Last week, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal decrying Google Book Search’s settlement with the Authors Guild and AAP. The author, Lynn Chu, is an intellectual property lawyer with Writers Representatives LLC - and someone to be taken seriously.
So why, if I respect what Chu is saying, do I continue to be adamant that GBS is a good tool for authors? Because of this: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy,” a statement made by Tim O’Reilly many times (and I actually heard him say it once). Whatever there is to say about Google Book Search and the Books Rights Registry, GBS does what no other search engine is doing right now - crawls books and makes those search results available.
GBS does not display the entire book (unless it is in the public domain and there are no rights attached to it). It displays a “snippet” - a little excerpt that gives a reader an idea of what the book’s about. So no one can seriously cobble together a pirated version of a book using GBS - the entire version is never made available, and the “snippets” are generated randomly.
If you’ve written a memoir about raising your autistic child, for example, and someone on the web is Googling “autism”, your book could come up as a resource for that person. She would be directed where to purchase it. And that’s a sale for you.
Small-press and self-published authors have a hard enough time trying to make their voices heard above the clamor of the “big guys”. GBS can level the playing field in many ways for you. It helps make your books discoverable - and discovery is crucial in a world where bookstore space can be purchased and the airwaves are taken up with celebrities hawking their latest cookbooks.
Everything we do at Authorweb is directed at helping small-press and self-published authors become less obscure. (That said, if one of our clients determines that they don’t want to participate in GBS, we will substitute another service for him or her - we’re not out to railroad anyone.)
Google is the search engine of choice for most of the world (and the default home page of many web browsers). You might not be comfortable with Google’s all-embracing power and its monopolistic tendencies, but to “opt out” is to, instead, opt for not being discoverable. On a collective basis, authors and publishers can bargain with Google through organizations they’ve set up for precisely that sort of legal wrangling; on an individual basis, deciding not to participate in GBS is just another way of saying, “I’d rather not have people find my work.”
And what author wants that?