As books go online, publishers run for cover – Technology – International Herald Tribune:

“We are facing all the same risks as the music industry,” said Olaf Ernst, worldwide director of e-books for Springer, a German scientific publisher. “But if our reaction is like theirs was, we will have problems.”

De Kemp said that in time, new techniques for restricting access to copyrighted books – like dicing a single work into many PDF files and using digital watermarks – could solve this problem.

while from its competitors google:

 has asked for a list of all the books available through their rivals’ online book projects now, and what books will be added to their digital stacks through 2010.

It also wants to see a showing of a legal right to scan each book, and the digital rights management process used to secure the book from copyright abuses.

Google also wants to see documents about any disputes the companies have had with The Authors Guild with respect to their book projects.

From Amazon.com, Google also wants to know the effect its book project has on Amazon’s book sales. (MarketWatch)

the whole lawsuuit of authors against googloe seems irrelevant:

“Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers,” said Colleen Scollans, the director of online sales for Oxford University Press.

She declined to provide specific figures, but said that sales growth has been “significant”. Scollans estimated that 1 million customers have viewed 12,000 Oxford titles using the Google program.

Specialty publisher Springer Science + Business reported sales growth of its backlist catalog using Google Book Search, with 99 percent of the 30,000 titles it has in the program getting viewed, including many published before 1992.

“We suspect that Google really helps us sell more books,” said Kim Zwollo, Springer’s global director of special licensing, declining to provide specific figures because the company is privately owned.

“Our experience has been that the revenue generated from Google has been pretty modest, whereas the Amazon program has generated more book sales,” Penguin Chief Executive John Makinson told Reuters at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week.

Amazon.com’s search tool also allows users to scan the contents of books and browse sample pages. For Penguin’s books included in the U.S. “Search Inside” program, sales have increased by 7 percent.

Historical warfare publisher Osprey is reaping the benefits of using both Google and Amazon to boost sales.

“When we looked at the first six months of stats, we saw that 30 percent of Google Book Search clicks went directly to our site, while roughly 40 percent went to Amazon,” said William Shepherd, Osprey’s managing director.

“Our sales through the Web are steadily increasing in proportion to our total sales, and we’re confident that Google Book Search will accelerate this growth.”

Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopaedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the “buy this book” Google link.

One of its many scientific titles, “Principles of Visual Anthropology”, has seen about one-quarter of the 1,206 views click on “buy this book”.

Arty coffee-table book publisher teNeues said its online sales have doubled over the past year, attributable primarily to a fresh marketing campaign and inclusion in Google’s book search, Chief Executive Hendrik teNeues said.  (reuters)

This goes back to my samling argument, that by providing pre-purchase sampling possibility to customers you can lower the entry barrier for buying as you lower risks associated with buying. But still, the data are pretty impressing…