A great convergence
Category: Copyright Law , Metadata
Stanley Greenfield is brilliant.On Sunday, I came across this little gem about selling books by the chapter or passage, citing programs in development by Google and Amazon. Stanley, of course, has been doing this for YEARS - he began in the 1980s, with Dial-A-Book, where you could call up and hear the first chapter of a book. As the Internet took hold, Stanley digitized these chapters and distributed them to Amazon, B&N, Borders, Ingram, B&T, plus all the independent Internet bookshops.
There was a period during the bust, as these bookshops began collapsing like a house of cards, when a lot of us were wondering whether Stanley would be able to make it. The market for digitized chapters seemed to shrink drastically, and it seemed like he'd saturated it.
But he held on. Stanley is both wise and tenacious, and he knows a good thing when he's got it. He drove his own costs down - he was one of the first people I ever knew who outsourced to Asia. And lo and behold...now that Amazon is doing "", now that Google is contemplating a "book rental" program (hello? anyone ever hear of ebrary?), Stanley looks damn near prescient.
Then there's China.
In the 1970s, Stanley was doing a lot of business with China. Now that China's opened up again, Stanley's got a whole infrastructure of contacts there, already in place - he knows how to work the government, and the kinds of political/economic machinations that thwart a lot of US companies are a breeze to him because he knows the ropes already. Yesterday, Stanley sent me a press release which began thusly:
Xinhua China Ltd.., the majority shareholder of the largest book
distributor in the People?s People?s Republic of China, has signed an
agreement with Dial-A-Book Inc. to mount more than 25,000 Chapter One book
browsing excerpts of English language books on its dealer network in China.
Stanley, you're amazing.
What I offer:
