Google Books partners with Chinese publishers
Marshall Kirkpatrick
8 comments »
Google Books, a program that’s been controversial in the US, has reportedly penned a deal with four publishing houses in China. Rival Baidu has deals with Chinese libraries instead; its program has access to 15 million books, the largest online collection of Chinese books in the world.
Working with libraries is the approach Google came under fire for in the US when publishers said their copyrighted materiel was being included in the program without their permission. The search company took an opt-out approach in the US. It’s notable that Windows Live Book Search has an opt-in program for publishers and Google appears to be following its lead when formulating its China strategy. Google Book Search China will give readers acccess to excerpts from books and require payment to read the full works.
Though book search has not inspired a whole lot of interest in the US, China’s long literary tradition may make this part of search more important there. I don’t know how things work in China, but it seems that partnering with libraries instead of publishers would be the best way to access thousands of years worth of books. Given all the lawsuits against US companies lately for failing to respect intellectual property in other countries, perhaps Google is taking a safe approach in China.
Good news
Being in Greater China, I’m not so sure how China’s long literary tradition will make book search more important.
In China, where copyright laws are essentially “for reference only”, unauthorized books are everywhere. They’re actually pretty “mainstream”. Depending on how you look at this, Google’s Book Search may or may not help legal book publishers. Perhaps they view the Google partnership as a strategy to fight back piracy once and for all.
Marshall - there have been some interesting articles about China on Techcrunch. Keep up the good work!
Indeed–funnythat in that bastion of intellectual property theft (sorry, basically true) Google chooses the super-pro-IP approach.
Looks like Google is busy trying to build a presence in everything that it can lay its hands on in the Chinese market.
Thesedays everybody wants a share of the Chinese pie, but Google isn’t getting the biggest slice like it does in the US in search.
Some screenshots from the Google China Book Search meeting.
http://www.kenwong.cn/post/pic.....hibit.html
Haochi - those are great! Thanks for posting them here!
I am interested in contacting a publisher to print a children’s book. thank you for your help. teri