Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

100% of Independent Publishers Who Do This Will Sell More of Their Work

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This post, by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant, originally appeared on Copyblogger on 12/5/13.

Most independent authors and content creators aren’t thinking in terms of building product funnels when they write their books and stories.

That is a mistake.

Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, smart writers who know how to build their catalog around funnels will always make more money directly with their words than writers who publish their work using the old “hope and pray” business plan.

Here’s how you do it.

 

Be a smarter publisher

We wrote for our own sites and blogs like Copyblogger for years — about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, you name it. But we both made a major shift during 2012 and 2013, and we spent the last year writing and publishing 1.5 million words of fiction through our company Realm & Sands.

In the two years since Copyblogger ran this post about serialized fiction, Sean has also published another two million words at his other company, Collective Inkwell, with David Wright.

But none of those millions of words were left to sell based on chance.

We wanted to make our full-time livings as authors — and since have — so we opted for something more certain.

Our words are our art, yes. But once those words are scrubbed in the editing process, they became products for sale. And what do smart marketers do with products? Well, if they want to sell any of those products, they arrange them into funnels.

Each week, we host the Self Publishing Podcast. In a year and a half of our show, the most frequently visited topic is how to build funnels.

Why?

Because applying proven marketing principles to independent authorship is how successful indie publishers turn a “luck of the draw” marketplace into a sound enterprise with a stable income source.

In our opinion, putting your work into product funnels is the very best (and most important) thing an author can do to increase sales … assuming you’ve created an excellent and professional-looking family of products.

Ready to sell some books? Well then, let’s take a look at “Funnels 101,” starting with exactly what they are and why you should care.

 

What is a funnel and why does it matter?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Copyblogger.

 

25 Things Every Indie Author Should Know

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This post, by Nenia Campbell, originally appeared on her Goodreads blog on 1/13/13.

1. If you are vending inferior goods, don’t be surprised if you don’t have any takers. You wouldn’t buy moldy food or a shirt that’s falling apart, right?

2. Do set your book at a reasonable price. Cheaper is probably better. People are more willing to branch out and experiment if the cost to them is low.

3. Your readers are not walking bags of money. Don’t treat them as if they are. They are people with thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and their respect and interest must be won, not wrested.

4. Big egos are lethal. If you are your own worst critic, nothing anyone says will bother you and advice will be easier to stomach if you admit to yourself that you are not perfect.

5. What happens on the internet does not stay on the internet. Anything you say can and will be held against you. Don’t be a jerk. Not just because you’ll inevitably get caught, but also because it’s just not professional.

6. Don’t take your readers for granted. Having a steady following doesn’t mean people won’t notice when you let your writing go.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Nenia Campbell’s Goodreads blog.

 

Kindle Singles and the Future of Ebooks

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This post, by Joe Wikert, originally appeared on his Digital Content Strategies blog on 10/21/13.

“Compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.” That’s Amazon’s tagline for their popular Kindle Singles program. And while Singles hasn’t exactly been a major industry disruptor I believe it lays the foundation for some of the bigger, bolder initiatives Amazon is planning for the future. I also believe it’s a model that will become much more common over time.

The formula looks like this:

1.End the practice of artificially puffing up content

The greatest aspect of Kindle Singles is, of course, their short length. The first one I read was a Single about media and I remember thinking how a typical business book editor would have asked the author to turn this 30-page gem into a bloated 300-page mess. It happens all the time and it’s a function of both physical shelf presence and perceived value. In the ebook world there’s suddenly no physical bookshelf an individual title has to have a spine presence on. Now we just need to stop equating “shorter” with “cheaper”…more on that in a moment.

2.Attention spans are shrinking

Face it. With very few exceptions you’re probably thrilled to read all this short-form content that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Blogs, no matter what they’re called, are very popular. Then came Twitter with its 140-character bursts of information. Let’s also not forget about all the other terrific short-form content services like Byliner that we’ve grown to love. Shortened content is also why The Week is such a popular magazine. Kindle Singles is just tapping into our desire to find the Cliff’s Notes on everything so that we can quickly read it and move on.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Digital Content Strategies.

 

What Does It Cost To Self-Publish?

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This post, by Sue Collier, originally appeared on Self Publishing Resources on 7/23/13.

Although it is possible to self-publish for a very small amount of money—have friends edit your manuscript, do your own interior layout, design your own cover, upload the files to a POD printer and/or ebook service—the reality is that by self-publishing, you are essentially launching a new business. And publishing a professional-looking, high-quality book will cost you some money.

So what can you expect spend for a book that looks as good and reads as well as the trad published stuff on the shelf next to it? Well, let’s say we have a 65,000-word manuscript in the self-help genre (nonfiction); there are no images, but several different levels of headings and a few tables that need to be created.

 

Editing

Every writer needs some kind of editor. Even if your sister-in-law’s cousin’s neighbor’s father was a former college professor and has offered to read your manuscript for free, I recommend you still hire a pro. As an editor myself, I have edited plenty of works written by academics—and other very smart people—who are awful writers and probably even worse editors.

You can expect to pay a minimum of $1,200 for a professional copy edit of a manuscript of that size. You might be able to find an editor who does it for a bit less and who probably has less editing experience. You can also expect to pay a lot more, depending on the level of editing required, anywhere from $2,600 and on up to several thousand dollars, depending on the experience of the editor. I’ve read some people estimate a developmental edit at $18,500, but that does seem quite high to me.

 

Interior layout

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Self Publishing Resources.

 

Are #Indies Getting Clobbered by Big Name E-book Discounts?

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This post, by Toby Neal, originally appeared on her blog on 12/4/13.

I think we are. And, it’s a great time to be a reader and shopping for e-books!

The DOJ price-fixing case with Apple and the Big 5 publishers was settled awhile ago, but September was when Amazon began really discounting big name books. I get several email lists of discounted books daily in my inbox, and I’ve been agog to see big names like Janet Evanovich, Louise Perry, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell and most recently, Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch, one of the Best Books of 2013, going for 2.99 or less.

I’ve bought more books than ever. More books than I should—but who can resist stockpiling these gems for a rainy reading day? I got the entire Game of Thrones set for around fifteen dollars! *goggle* If there’s ever a Zombie Apocalypse, I’ll be holed up in my bunker with all my ebook treasures, reading until the battery runs out!

Many of these have been older titles, but in preparing for Christmas, Barnes and Noble and Amazon seem to be pulling out all the stops and there’s no book whose price they won’t slash.

And in September, my sales went to half of what they’d been. They’ve stayed at half what they’d been in spite of doing active marketing, ads on Kirkus Reviews, giveaways, promos in those same lists I get in my email inbox, and launching two new books.

It’s like being the wimpy kid at the beach in that old commercial from the comics, getting sand kicked in your eye. Cheaper pricing was our advantage as indies.

I predicted this would happen in this blog post. In fact I’m surprised it took this long to happen. I’ve been asking around to other indies and they’re reporting similar dismal sales. So what can we do?

I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, and diversify. Here are some ideas to try:

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Toby Neal’s blog.

 

Building Your Platform

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This post, by Carolyn Kaufman, originally appeared on her Archetype Writing site in July of 2009. While it’s over four years old, the post’s coverage of the basics of author platform is still applicable to any author just starting out with platform.

What is a platform?
A platform is name recognition of some kind. Celebrity, if you will.

Why do you need one?
A platform will help you attract the attention of an agent and later a publisher. Why?

Because having a platform proves that you:

* Care enough about your project to promote it
* Have some marketing savvy
* Come with a built-in fan based (read: guaranteed sales)

More importantly, a good platform will help sell your book when it comes out. Fewer and fewer publishers are putting money into promoting books — especially books by unknowns and newcomers. That means that the onus of promotion falls almost completely (and sometimes completely) on you, the author. You are the one who’s going to be making people aware of the book, and convincing them to buy it. You are the one who’s responsible for making the book a success.

Just sit with that for a minute.

Your job doesn’t end with writing the book. It doesn’t end with landing an agent or even a publisher. These days, you must also be a marketing expert.

The good news is, you can learn how if you don’t know. And I’m going to help you get started.

Do you already have the makings of a platform?

 

If you’re writing nonfiction, do you have any of the following in the area you’re writing about?

* Advanced degrees or certifications (e.g. MA, PhD)

* Teaching experience

* Speaking experience (e.g. you’re the pastor of a large church, you give presentations to large corporate groups)

* Professional (i.e. on-the-job) experience

* Expert experience (i.e. have you been quoted in newspapers or magazines as an expert on your topic?

* Published articles in local (good) or national (better) magazines or newspapers

* A polished, professional-looking website or blog

 

If you’re writing fiction, do you have any of the following?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Archetype Writing.

 

Audio Proofing Word Files On Kindle

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This post, by Morris Rosenthal, originally appeared on his Foner Books site on 10/29/13.

Today I caught myself, with the shaving cream prepared for action on my hand, running my toothbrush under the hot water. I took it for my razor. So it’s not surprising that I have trouble proofreading my own writing, as my blog entries frequently testify. Believe me, I go through them several times before posting, you’re seeing the cleaned up versions:-)

One proofreading trick I discovered a couple years ago is to send Word files to an eInk Kindle and to read them there in large print. For some reason, this has more of a “published” feel to me than laser printed proofs, and the look of a published book is the only thing that recalls my proofing ability to the old days, when I never made it through a trade book without spotting errors.

Last week, as I was finishing up a guide to borrowing audiobooks from public libraries for Kindle and Fire, a little light bulb went off in my head. Audio? Proofing? I fired up my Kindle 2 (on which it’s possible to listen to library audiobooks though you have to download them to a PC first and transfer by USB) and used Send To Kindle to send over the draft I was working on. Then I used that funny synthesized voice that has been available on Kindle eInk since the beginning, and lo and behold, I picked up on a couple more errors I had missed through repeated readings.

 

Click here to read the rest of the how-to on Foner Books.

 

Providing Rich Reading For Time Poor Readers

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This post, by Martyn Daniels, originally appeared on the Brave New World blog on 10/23/13.

How do we get people reading again or introduce them to reading?

We have to accept that reading is different in that it stimulates thinking and imagery that is often served up on a plate with other media. After all, you don’t have to imagine what someone looks like when they are stood as large as life in front of you on a screen.

We have seen many charity and government-backed initiatives and ones driven by the industry itself but the bottom line is that at best they are treading water and at worst losing the battle. We may all cheer from the battlements when books are donated and given away free to folk but if this is not succeeding we have to ask whether the focus and process is correct and what we have to do to really engage and make a difference.

The YouTube age is impacting not just the young but the older generations. We are becoming more and more visual and increasingly time poor. Giving someone a book is not addressing the problem and merely compounding it. We have to create the thirst and feed the habit not just give someone War and Peace and expect a convert. The studies don’t lie. The latest from the National Literacy Trust study of 34,910 young people, claimed nearly a third of children between eight and 16 say they read no text-based media at all in their daily leisure time and that the number of children who read outside school has fallen by 25% since 2005.

Many thought that children’s reading was migrating from print to digital, but in reality their consumption of information is moving away from reading or writing text. Their attitude to reading have also become more negative over time. This was reflected in 21.5% of young people agreeing with the statement, “I would be embarrassed if my friends saw me read,” up from 16.6% on the 2010 study.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on the Brave New World blog.

 

Publish Faster, Publish Less: Futurebook’s “Big Ideas”

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This post, by Porter Anderson, originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 11/26/13.

LONDON: In publishing these days, one person’s big idea is the next person’s belly laugh.

But “The Big Ideas Session” near the end of The Bookseller’s FutureBook conference in London last Thursday was intended to be the day’s most provocative event. (Of course, there were some other provocations, as covered yesterday by Roger Tagholm in Is Government the Only Force Able to End Amazon Dominance?)

In the trademark deep-pink glow of the FutureBook’s backdrop, the segment crackled with lightning glimpses of an industry still picking its way awkwardly, sometimes testily, across a treacherous digital landscape.

Faber & Faber’s Stephen Page energetically hosted a panel of eight industry figures, each of whom had a few minutes to pitch a “big idea” to the 600+ attendees at Queen Elizabeth II Centre, Westminster.

Calling the group into session, Page left no doubt that he hoped for something a bit more than a smooth ride, remarking: “To change, when you’re doing pretty well, is incredibly difficult. We must innovate in the core, in the core of our publishing.”

Adding that he’d like the session to offer particular challenges to publishing houses that still see ebooks as innovative, he said, “It’s nonsense to say publishing doesn’t innovate. Who here today will be who we talk about in 20 years?”

 

Michael Bhaskar: “Don’t Believe the Crap”

The first to take the lectern was Profile Books’ Digital Publishing Director Michael Bhaskar, who took aim at what he sees as three myths surrounding publishing.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post, which includes input from numerous industry experts, on Publishing Perspectives.

 

No, Mike Shatzkin did NOT say that publishing is spiraling down the drain

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 11/21/13.

As part of the promotion of the Digital Book World conference, I do some interviewing with the very capable Jeremy Greenfield, the editor of their blog. And Jeremy takes our conversations and chops them up into short pieces around the themes of our show. Since the focus of Digital Book World is “how digital is changing publishing”, Amazon is a topic of great interest and one we try to address in an original and enlightening way.

In my interview with Jeremy, for which he published very brief but entirely accurate excerpts, I did say that publishers would face a real selling job with authors when Amazon’s share grows by another 25% from its current base or if Barnes & Noble closed. Neither of those things is likely to happen in the next few years. If and when the day comes that one of those things does happen, not all publishers would be entirely defenseless even with today’s arsenal of capabilities. And Jeremy’s piece closes with my suggestion that publishers can help themselves by doing “digital marketing at scale, which is audience-centric in its thinking.”

Despite how this is interpreted in some circles, it does not add up to publishing “spiraling down the drain”.

Amazon is already truly disruptive and it isn’t clear to anybody but those on the inside of Amazon exactly how disruptive. I’ve written earlier that we know nothing about the used book marketplace they host and foster, which we must assume cuts into sales, particularly of bestselling books which have many copies in circulation. A recent discussion on a mailing list I’m on revolved around what we don’t know about how many ebooks are being published. Why? Because Bowker, which issues ISBN numbers and therefore helps us count the titles going into the marketplace, doesn’t necessarily get to touch (and count) titles that stay entirely inside of Amazon and therefore only use the Amazon “ASIN” substitute for the ISBN. Other ebook retailers will handle titles without ISBN numbers, but only Amazon has a large enough market by itself to make a substantial number of self-publishers work with them alone.

And now we have the anomaly of sales reporting from the AAP, once again working without totally internal Amazon IP, that suggests ebook sales are going down. Are they going down? Or are self-published titles exclusively inside Amazon taking share away from the part of the business we can see and count for ourselves and masking the ebook sales growth that is actually taking place? I have no evidence, but that strikes me as a more likely reality than that ebook sales have actually fallen year-to-year recently.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

Why You Should Be Paying More Than $50 For Ebook Formatting & Conversion

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This post, by Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton, originally appeared on her Indie Author Blog on 5/20/13.

I just posted this in response to a service provider who commented on my earlier post, Ebook Madness: Don’t Confuse Ebook Conversion With Ebook Formatting! In his comment on that post, this gentleman said he only charges $40-50 for the typical formatting AND conversion job, and asked if he’s not charging enough.

My answer was an emphatic YES, and I’m reprinting the full response here because I think both service providers and those who seek their services need to get a better understanding of the economics involved. Here’s my response, in full:
————————————————

Yes, you are most definitely not charging enough to either do a thorough job or earn a living wage, though I’m sure you don’t realize it.

Let’s assume you begin with an MS Word file containing 300pp, which is the typical length of a typical novel. Let’s say you charge your higher end estimate of $50 to do the formatting and conversion.

You can take $22.50 right off the top for self-employment taxes**, leaving you with $27.50. But you still have to pay income tax on that income, and even if we assume you’re in a very low bracket, say 25%, you’re losing an additional $6.88 in income tax, which means you’re really only earning $20.62 for the job—and that’s before taking out your expenses, as you should be doing before figuring your net income.

**UPDATE – several have questioned my math on the taxes, and since I know math is not my strong suit I’m willing to defer to their judgment. But even if the taxes are only $10 per $50 you get paid as a freelancer (and I’m pretty sure they’re quite a lot more than that), you’re still only earning slave wages by the time you take all the expenses, weekly hours you don’t have booked with paying work, and weekly hours you spend on non-paying but necessary stuff like billing and promotion into account.

Your electricity, internet access and software aren’t free. Neither is the cell phone you probably use sometimes for communicating with clients. But I’m fairly certain you’re not taking these items, or the taxes, into account because if you were you’d realize you’re barely earning minimum wage on each job.

Getting back to those 300 pp…let’s assume you spend two hours reviewing the MS Word file and making your formatting changes. Even if you use a bunch of scripts or other automated processes to do the formatting changes, you MUST at least LOOK at every single page to be sure you haven’t missed anything that needs to be reformatted to be ebook -compliant. Two hours only allows your 120 minutes total for the job, or 24 seconds per page to review each page AND make any additional formatting changes as necessary. If the MS Word file you’ve been given is filled with lots of funky and inconsistent Styles and/or formatting, the job will take even longer but again, you have to at least look at EVERY SINGLE PAGE to know if this is the case.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on the Indie Author Blog.

 

10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained

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This post, by Brad Templeton, originally appeared on Templetons.com.

Note that this is an essay about copyright myths. It assumes you know at least what copyright is — basically the legal exclusive right of the author of a creative work to control the copying of that work. If you didn’t know that, check out my own brief introduction to copyright for more information. Feel free to link to this document, no need to ask me. Really, NO need to ask.

1) “If it doesn’t have a copyright notice, it’s not copyrighted.” This was true in the past, but today almost all major nations follow the Berne copyright convention. For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not. The default you should assume for other people’s works is that they are copyrighted and may not be copied unless you know otherwise. There are some old works that lost protection without notice, but frankly you should not risk it unless you know for sure.

It is true that a notice strengthens the protection, by warning people, and by allowing one to get more and different damages, but it is not necessary. If it looks copyrighted, you should assume it is. This applies to pictures, too. You may not scan pictures from magazines and post them to the net, and if you come upon something unknown, you shouldn’t post that either.

The correct form for a notice is:

“Copyright [dates] by [author/owner]”

You can use C in a circle © instead of “Copyright” but “(C)” has never been given legal force. The phrase “All Rights Reserved” used to be required in some nations but is now not legally needed most places. In some countries it may help preserve some of the “moral rights.”

 

2) “If I don’t charge for it, it’s not a violation.” False. Whether you charge can affect the damages awarded in court, but that’s main difference under the law. It’s still a violation if you give it away — and there can still be serious damages if you hurt the commercial value of the property. There is a USA exception for personal copying of music, which is not a violation, though courts seem to have said that doesn’t include widescale anonymous personal copying as Napster. If the work has no commercial value, the violation is mostly technical and is unlikely to result in legal action. Fair use determinations (see below) do sometimes depend on the involvement of money.

 

3) “If it’s posted to Usenet it’s in the public domain.” False. Nothing modern and creative is in the public domain anymore unless the owner explicitly puts it in the public domain(*). Explicitly, as in you have a note from the author/owner saying, “I grant this to the public domain.” Those exact words or words very much like them.
 

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Templetons.com.

 

13 Things Mentally Strong People Avoid

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While this article by Cheryl Connor originally appeared on Forbes.com (on 11/18/13), and is primarily intended for businesspeople, everything in it is applicable to author-publishers too. We struggle with the same issues of self-doubt, motivation and changing marketplace demands just as much as any other businessperson.

For all the time executives spend concerned about physical strength and health, when it comes down to it, mental strength can mean even more. Particularly for entrepreneurs, numerous articles talk about critical characteristics of mental strength—tenacity, “grit”, optimism, and an unfailing ability as Forbes contributor David Williams says, to “fail up.”

However, we can also define mental strength by identifying the things mentally strong individuals don’t do. Over the weekend, I was impressed by this list compiled by Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker, that she shared in LifeHack. It impressed me enough I’d also like to share her list here along with my thoughts on how each of these items is particularly applicable to entrepreneurs.

1. Waste Time Feeling Sorry for Themselves. You don’t see mentally strong people feeling sorry for their circumstances or dwelling on the way they’ve been mistreated. They have learned to take responsibility for their actions and outcomes, and they have an inherent understanding of the fact that frequently life is not fair. They are able to emerge from trying circumstances with self-awareness and gratitude for the lessons learned. When a situation turns out badly, they respond with phrases such as “Oh, well.” Or perhaps simply, “Next!”

2. Give Away Their Power. Mentally strong people avoid giving others the power to make them feel inferior or bad. They understand they are in control of their actions and emotions. They know their strength is in their ability to manage the way they respond.

3. Shy Away from Change. Mentally strong people embrace change and they welcome challenge. Their biggest “fear”, if they have one, is not of the unknown, but of becoming complacent and stagnant. An environment of change and even uncertainty can energize a mentally strong person and bring out their best.

4. Waste Energy on Things They Can’t Control. Mentally strong people don’t complain (much) about bad traffic, lost luggage, or especially about other people, as they recognize that all of these factors are generally beyond their control. In a bad situation, they recognize that the one thing they can always control is their own response and attitude, and they use these attributes well.

 

Click here to read the rest of the article, which includes 9 more things mentally strong people avoid, on Forbes.

 

Life Inside The Megaconglomerate Book Business

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Daniel Menaker, formerly an editor for Random House, contributed a very interesting article to Vulture yesterday: What Does the Book Business Look Like on the Inside?

“Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in The New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.”

– – – – –

“Publishing is an often incredibly frustrating culture. If you want to buy a project—let’s say a nonfiction proposal for a book about the history of Sicily—some of your colleagues will say, “The proposal is too dry” or “Cletis Trebuchet did a book for Grendel Books five years ago about Sardinia and it sold, like, eight copies,” or, airily, “I don’t think many people want to read about little islands.” When Seabiscuit first came up for discussion at an editorial meeting at Random House, some skeptic muttered, “Talk about beating a dead horse!” ”

“To make matters worse, financial success in frontlist publishing is very often random, but the media conglomerates that run most publishing houses act as if it were not. Yes, you may be able to count on a new novel by Surething Jones becoming a big best seller. But the best-­seller lists paint nothing remotely like the full financial picture of any publication, because that picture’s most important color is the size of the advance. But let’s say you publish a fluky blockbuster one year, the corporation will see a spike in your profits and sort of autistically, or at least automatically, raise the profit goal for your division by some corporately predetermined amount for the following year. This is close to clinically insane institutional behavior.”

 

Click here to read the full article on Vulture.

 

8 Years Later, Google’s Book Scanning Crusade Ruled ‘Fair Use’

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This article, by Cade Metz, originally appeared on the Wired site on 11/14/13.

Eight years after a group of authors and publishers sued Google for scanning more than 20 million library books without the permission of rights holders, a federal judge has ruled that the web giant’s sweeping book project stayed within the bounds of U.S. copyright law.

On Thursday morning, U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin dismissed a lawsuit from the Authors Guild, ruling that Google’s book scans constituted fair use under the law. Though Google scanned those 20 million books in full and built a web service, Google Books, that lets anyone search the digital texts, users can only view “snippets” of a book if the right holder hasn’t given approval.

“In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits,” the ruling reads. “It advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders.”

In a statement sent to WIRED, a Google spokesperson said the company was “absolutely delighted” with the ruling. “As we have long said, Google Books is in compliance with copyright law and acts like a card catalog for the digital age giving users the ability to find books to buy or borrow.”

Michael Boni, a partner with Boni & Zack, the law firm representing the Authors Guild, did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment. Nor did the Authors Guild. But the Guild has told other news outlets it will appeal the decision.

 

Click here to read the rest of the article, which includes a statement from the Authors Guild, on Wired.

Also see this article, Google Books Ruling a Win for Fair Use … and Rich Tech Companies, on Slate.