Yesterday, we asked that Tor get in touch with Amazon to object that entire short stories in three of our anthologies (two edited by David, one jointly edited) are accessible via Amazon's new full search feature. Having gotten in touch with our publisher's legal department, I can now tell you the crux of the problem: page headers are part of the searchable text and the titles of stories are usually in page headers. Links to individual pages give access a page or two in each direction from the target page, so images of all pages are easy to get. Nevermind that our contracts with our publisher probably don't permit such a use -- we could decide to be easy about that -- our contracts with our contributors for the books in question certainly don't!

You may think, well, this is a pretty cumbersome way to ready a book. But it's not all that cumbersome when compared to a number of the commercially available ebooks sold in the past decade. You may think copyright is protected because only images of all the pages are accessible, whereas electronic text is not directly accessible. Anyone with OCR software can produce an electronic text copy fairly quickly once in possession of all the page images. This is a disaster for the longterm reprint value of the stories, especially in the foreign rights market. This is something that SFWA needs to take up with Amazon.

I am hoping that Amazon will be able to in some way block searching on page headers so that their system functions as intended and does not compromise the reprint value of stories we reprint. I applaud Amazon's innovative approach to promoting the works of authors to readers who might not otherwise have discovered them. I wish, however, that they had taken a more sophisticated approach to copyright before releasing this upon the world.

SEE ALSO: The article Fail-Safe Amazon Images, summarized by O'Reilly as:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) allow anyone with some coding skills to create applications using Amazonfs data, including its images. But relying on someone elsefs data on someone elsefs servers introduces some challenges. Paul Bausch, author of Amazon Hacks, shows you how to properly display Amazon product images in a dependent, distributed application.