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[ 31.03.2009 ]

How to become a Google author

1. You receive a request from a publishing company asking you to grant them the digital rights for one of your books that it has already published, but for which it does not yet have these rights.

2. You agree to allow the publisher to use the book digitally as it will provide you with more publication options.

3. Your publishing house is collaborating with the Bavarian State Library’s scheme to develop an Internet platform on which books published more than three years ago are made accessible to the international scientific community.

4. The publications on the platform are open access (free and available to all).

5. When a work is used commercially, publishing companies are required to pay authors their share of the royalties.

6. Yet nobody ever uses your works commercially, as they are already in the public domain.

7. The Bavarian State Library is the only German-language library in Google’s global partnership programme to collaborate on scanning books and making them available in digital form.

8. Without obtaining the rights beforehand, Google offers out-of-print books or those for which the copyright has expired in full text on Google Book Search.

9. When a Google partner or a publisher grants Google the rights to a work, it hands over the following rights: online publications, downloads, print-on-demand, and e-books.

10. Google is required to share all proceeds from advertising in electronic editions with the author and the publisher.

11. You do not make a contract with Google, yet have granted Google rights by agreeing to – or rather not rejecting – its terms; payment occurs automatically.

12. Once Google offers a book in full text, it will never be able to re-enter the primary or print media market except in alternative forms such as print-on-demand and e-books (Kindle 1); and/or as text displayed on a screen and read by a synthetic voice – a sort of e-book- audiobook hybrid. (Kindle 2).

13. As an author, you wait for someone out there in the world to search for (access) your book.

14. You have become a Google author.

 

How not to become a Google author

1. You do not take up Google’s invitation to open an author’s account and supply your personal data and information about your legal relationships at googlebooksettlement.com.

2. Hence Google does not have the data it needs - e.g., your tax identification number, bank account, and information about your legal relationship with your publishing company - to develop its digital rights agency, which aims at operating across all languages and countries (and their respective laws).

3. You write to BookSettlement_de@RustConsulting.com that you are interested in finding out the conditions for drawing up an individual contract with Google.

4. You are not content with Google’s automatic replies and so you write again.

5. You are annoyed by the constant automated responses and decide to go to the press with your objections.

6. The head of Google’s book partnerships in Europe, Santiago de la Mora, responds and dismisses your criticisms as uncalled for: without the consent of the author or rightsholder, Google does not make more than one page available.

7. The first sample of your work that you find at Google Book Search contains 10 of a total of 12 pages from a contribution you published in an anthology, even though you never gave anyone the right to use it.

8. You wait for the advertised mid-year invitation from Literar-Mechana, VG Wort, or ProLitteris (all copyright protection associations). These associations will enable you to assert your rights collectively, receive payment for the use of your works to date, and deny Google all future rights of use.

Gerhard Ruiss, Vienna, 23 March 2009

(Writer and managing director of the Austrian Writers’ Union, IG Autorinnen Autoren.)