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The eBook industry is a very fast growing industry today, owing to the fact there are more than 203 million people who use the internet in the US and more than 100 million in China. This is just a small part of the whole world!
The effects of internet is being seen even on the 400 year old newspaper industry and they have been forced to accept these changes and make available, their news and editions of newspapers online. Even the advertisers are now concentrating more on the internet rather than on the Television, to put their advertisements, and this has become a serious threat to the Television industry also.
The studies reveal that the revenue for the US alone with online advertisement is around RM 38 Billion, and that is just the beginning of it! The book industry is also under great pressure as the eBook industry is taking over their place. The three big internet kingdoms, the Amazon.com, the Google.com and the e-Bay are making a lot of money through advertisements, eBooks and various other methods. The Amazon which is celebrating the 10th anniversary this year, has more than 49 million followers and their revenue was about RM 26.3 billion last year. The e-Bay also is 10 years old and it is the biggest online auction site available to the consumers. It has anything that a consumer would be looking for, that too at breath-taking prices, which you can never imagine of getting at any shops. They have items in more than 40,000 categories and sub categories, and is said to have a user rate of 150 million users, with the revenue of RM 155 billion!
The Google is one of the best search engines that give information about anything and everything possible, and the arrival of these companies have definitely shattered the peace of the book sellers and publishers. If these companies get the right to trade books online, there wouldn’t be any more need of publishers and traders who use the traditional methods.
This is why the publishers have risen against the idea of digital scanning of books introduced by Google. The big Publishers and organisations like the American Publishers Organisation, have filed a complaint against this in the New York District Court. This move was started off by the Big Five among the publishers, namely, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, McGraw Hill, John Wiley and Sons and the Pearson group.
The idea of Google is to provide options for scanning the books from major libraries. Using this service, you can look for a certain passage or a quote among a large volume of books available in various libraries. This saves you the trouble of buying a whole book or going up to the library to look up for the book and the quote or passage you need. They have put forth a defence to the hue and cry against them, with the concept of Fair Use, which allows the copyrighted materials to be used for learning and research purposes.
The Google is now working on the Google Print Library Project, which will let them scan almost all books from all major libraries and also from the major universities! This is sure to affect the US authors also. The Google argues that this battle is for the benefit of the public as they are going to reap the rewards of these services from Google, but the fact is that some part of the public, at least the publishers and authors will be very badly affected, if Google wins the case.
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