German publishers' Google challenge

IHT - Doreen Carvajal :: International Herald Tribune : "When the online retailer Amazon.com came calling a year ago to sign up German publishers for a digital indexing project, one book executive urged a strategy of polite rebuffs.

Then this year, when Google started wooing publishers to sign on for its own digital book project, that German executive, Matthias Ulmer, decided the time was ripe to seize control with a homegrown counterattack.

Now Ulmer and a five-member task force of the German book trade association Börsenverein are organizing their own digital indexing project, Volltextsuche Online. The effort of the 6,000-member association of booksellers and publishers comes in reaction to Google's plans, unveiled in December, to start digitizing books in the world, with the first step being major university library collections in the United States.

The German project includes some publishing industry heavyweights like Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, a Stuttgart-based media group. But it still faces a test of membership reaction at a general assembly of the association on June 17 in Berlin. The trade association is not putting the idea to a vote but will essentially gather feedback.

Publishers are well aware of the resources of their rival, Google Print, which plans to offer free, searchable online copies of out-of-copyright books. But they are most concerned about its plans to also offer limited portions of newer books like the table of contents and excerpts. Amazon has already expanded its basic keyword searching techniques so that results display information from inside books.

Google's ambitious undertaking has created unease in France over the hegemony of the English language and has led to a European effort to organize an alternative library scanning initiative. The Association of American University Presses in the United States has also raised fears that the Google project could lead to massive copyright infringement.

Stefan Keuchel, a spokesman for Google Germany in Hamburg, said the German initiative and the French effort had turned into something of a political debate. Ulmer said it was possible to offer the beginnings of a searchable database as early as this autumn by using existing decentralized servers of publishers and converting digital material to lower resolution files.

Since the trade organization started organizing its initiative after the Google project was announced, the reaction has varied among booksellers, who were largely positive, and publishers, who harbored some doubts about taking on such an ambitious project.

Rudiger Wischenbart, a Frankfurt-based cultural consultant and former communications director for the Frankfurt Book Fair, said many booksellers and publishers were simply frightened by the future. Sprang said the organization had invited Google and Amazon to participate in the project and the general assembly to address booksellers and publishers for a panel discussion on the future of digital publishing.

Keuchel of Google declined to comment on company plans for digitizing books in Germany. But in response to the trade association's invitation, he said Google already had plans under way in the United States for its own project.

Börsenverein's project would begin with newer, front-list titles dating back about five years, according to Ulmer. He also said he envisioned the new system offering new ways of buying books in various forms.

For example, readers could buy a single chapter of a book, download a title for a short period or buy a mixture of chapters from different biographies of the same person. "Of course, it's in the interest of Google and Amazon and the big publishers that this platform doesn't exist," Ulmer said. "But we have the power to make it happen.""