HarperCollins’ Defensive Offense — or Offensive Defense
It is hard to know what to make of HarperCollins’ new initiative to allow book browsing. Bookstores have long permitted customers to browse books on display – a shrink-wrapped book is more likely to be passed over. For online shoppers, services like Amazon.com’s online book-browsing are a terrific complement to reading reviews, but they are useful only after the book has been identified. Search services that allow the user to find books containing certain search terms – Google Book Search – vastly expand the tools available to the public, freeing us from antiquated searches limited to author, title or subject matter.
Given the services available already from aggregators like Amazon.com and Google, why would HarperCollins jump into the fray? Perhaps it’s motivation is pure competition, such as the hope that its online tools will keep shoppers and researchers on its own website, limiting their choices to HarperCollins books. There is nothing wrong with that motivation. It is just foolish. The record companies tried to keep aggregators like Tower Records out of the music downloading market by offering their own branded dot-coms, leaving a whole laundry list of them littering the ‘net graveyard. Movie studios tried similar tactics. These copyright holding companies have a hard time accepting the fact that people don’t shop by the name of the publisher. (When did you ever walk into a bookstore and ask to be directed to the HarperCollins section?) But if it is foolishness, they will learn soon enough.
Of greater concern is whether it is a copyright expansionist move. The story attributes Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins, with saying that the book industry had lagged the music and film businesses in providing customers with preview snippets. That’s where the red flag pops up for me. Copyright holding companies in both of those industries were quick to try to gain control over the marketing of copies of their works. The Copyright Act makes clear (as does about 100 years of Supreme Court precedent) that the copyright owner’s right to control sales of lawful copies of its works ends as soon as those copies are owned by someone else, like the retailer. But when new technology enabled retailers to provide music samples and movie previews direct to their prospective customers, some record companies and movie studios took the position that retailers needed a license to do so. While they were happy to provide “free” licenses, they came with strings attached. A record company license gave the record company the right to order black-out dates, presumably for when it wanted to favor some different product or sales channel. A movie studio licensed previews on condition that the retailer say nothing negative about the movie, pretty much guaranteeing that the retailer could not give an honest assessment to its customers (and would have to police its “customer reviews” to delete the ones in breach of the license). Could this sordid scenario be part of HarperCollins’ thinking? Does it want to offer its own book-browsing as the first step in trying to force retailers to link to the HarperCollins site where it can cross-market other HarperCollins books to the retailers’ customers and gather valuable consumer data?
“Right now HarperCollins is not interested in becoming a retailer,” said Jane Friedman, the company’s chief executive. “But boy, are we interested in continuing, maintaining and growing as a No. 1 marketer on the Web.”
That’s the rub. Retailers of books published by HarperCollins have an absolute right to sell the copies they own to whomever they choose, at the price they choose and in the manner they choose, even over the objection of HarperCollins. But to do so, they must also enjoy the right to market them as they choose. Online book-browsing is a proven way of marketing. If HarperCollins is truly not interested in becoming a retailer, let’s hope it is also not interested in suppressing the retailers’ choice of marketing tools. Each retailer also wants to be the No. 1 marketer on the Web, and can achieve that by matching its customers to the books of any publisher, without favoring Harper Collins.