"The text may not be downloaded. and although Amazon does not make it easy to copy or print the text, most any high schooler will know what to do. (To print a screen shot, the user would zoom in on the text of the recipe and hit the "print screen" button on the keyboard [why doesn't my iMac have such a button? Oh well]. To copy a screen shot, the user would instead hit "ALT" and "print screen"; the text may then be pasted into a document and the rest of the screen shot cropped). Once 20 percent of the book has been viewed, Amazon stops further browsing in that book for 30 days." Guess what: with google coming now, within a few weeks you'll be able to view 100% of the book anytime you want. Isn't competition great?
"For those for whom cookbooks hold no special allure [that would be moi], the search feature may effectively eliminate the need to purchase one. Will anyone bother to spend the money for the book when the recipes can be accessed online?" [not me!]
"At least one bookseller was pessimistic about the venture's potential impact on sales overall, not to mention its ethical issues. 'Cookbooks are often bought for a particular recipe,' said Nach Waxman, owner of Kitchen Arts and Letters, a specialty bookstore in Manhattan handling about 13,000 titles. 'Practically nobody buys a cookbook because they expect to cook everything in the book. If you give many people what they want, it would give them a good reason to say 'I got what I needed.' While Waxman and his staff tend to accomodate customers who wish to simply spend a few minutes looking through a book, they don't allow copying of recipes. 'For the simple reason that this is how the authors make their living,' he said."
One of things I love about Borders and Barnes & Noble is you can sit there forever, copying whatever you like, and no one ever bothers you. With the invasion of the cellcam - bookofjoe addressed the issue of digital theft in Japan some weeks ago: it's basically impossible to stop, just like the attempts to put a finger in the dike of locker room and gym cams, soon to have major Web presences - all bets are off. Someone once said, "Everyone's nude somewhere on the Internet." Not yet, but sooner than you might think: just wait until ordinary people start getting naked pix of themselves from friends who've pulled them off the Web - ha!
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
i don't think it's gonna dismantle anything.
anybody who will snag, say, a recipe from a book without buying it wouldn't have bought the book in the first place.
2 - Eric Olsen
Joe , thanks for this as it is a hot topic. I don't think it will do any harm, either. The sections available around the search item is limited and will function like a 30-second sampling of a song, which pretty much everyone now agrees helps sales, as opposed to file sharing entire songs, which may or may not help/hurt sales depending of who paid for the study.
I think it's all good! Yeay
3 - Chad Orzel
Of course, if Google is to be believed, there are already in excess of twenty thousand potato gratin recipes on the Web. Maybe that specific one isn't in the list (I don't know, as I don't really care enough to scan all 21,000 entries), but you don't need Amazon's help to do away with most of the need for cookboks.
4 - Michelle
Interesting questions, but would I go through all the hassle of printing 20% of the book as screenshots, wait 30 days and go on with the rest till I have the book complete? It's so much easier to enter a bookstore and buy the damn thing;-)
5 - Eric Olsen
exactly, concerns over this are - as usual - greatly overwrought. I see a net gain for publishers and authors. Give a little, gain a lot.
6 - Corinna Hasofferett
and a net gain for blogcritics and blogers at large, which in turn helps the industry:
at my last post here, thanks to Amazon's new toy I was able to find books relating to an important authority in the Israeli Army and politics history. No book of his seems to have been translated into English, but there was a very long list of books which mentioned him plenty.