Digital Media

The revised Google Books settlement agreement may quiet international opponents, but it still gives Google a monopoly on commercializing out-of-print books where the copyrights are unclaimed and fails to protect consumer privacy, opponents said on Monday.

"We're at a cross roads," Internet Archive Director Brewster Kahle said during a panel late Monday on the Future of Books at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. "Is it going to be a subscription life...where one or two companies own the distribution and presentation (rights) to these books?"

In response, Google Books Engineering Director Dan Clancy said: "This is just one of a panoply of choices that people will have in the future."

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive director, and Dan Clancy, engineering director of Google Books, face off during a panel at the Commonwealth Club.

(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET)

Google is scanning and digitizing books in libraries and publishers' catalogs so people can view and search them online and buy electronic versions. The company is striking deals with publishers for copyright-protected books and offering to pay rights holders to digitize out-of-print works, and will share revenue from sales with authors.

The agreement would settle a 2005 copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild over Google's book scanning plans.

Key concerns focus on licensing rights to so-called "orphan works" where the copyright holder is unknown, as well as books where the rights holder has not stepped forward--together estimated to represent more than half of the available works.

The modified settlement, filed in federal court in New York late on Friday, attempts to address U.S. Department of Justice concerns that the settlement would give Google unfair competitive advantages and violated copyright law.

Copyrights holders now have more control than they previously had. Authors and publishers were given seats on a Books Rights Registry board, a nonprofit that would be responsible for making payments and holding revenue from unclaimed works for up to 10 years. The registry is now required to search for copyright holders who have not yet come forward and revenue from unclaimed works will be used to locate copyright holders instead of for operations or distribution it to known copyright holders.

The revised settlement also could remove some of the heat Google was getting from governments in other countries over copyright concerns. Author and publisher groups in Germany, France, China, and elsewhere have voiced opposition to the Google Books plan. In response, Google, the Authors Guild, and other parties in the settlement excluded any out-of-print works not registered in the U.S. or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.

"Just because they are taken out of the agreement doesn't mean Google will stop scanning their books," Pam Samuelson, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said of the works from the other countries. "Google has already scanned many of their books."

Also troubling to critics is the fact that the revised settlement circumvents traditional copyright provisions by allowing Google to digitize orphan works without first getting rights holder permission, while any Google competitors are blocked from doing so barring legislation granting them licensing rights.

"For the millions of volumes of orphan books that Google has already scanned in, they can offer those without risk of anyone coming forward and suing them for infringement," said John Simpson, a consumer advocate at Consumer Watchdog.

The Justice Department's main concerns were not addressed, others added. (A DOJ spokeswoman did not return a call seeking comment.)

"The Department of Justice was trying to get them to also create a mechanism for licensing to third parties and the amended settlement agreement doesn't go that far," Samuelson said. "It creates a fiduciary for unclaimed books to potentially license unclaimed books at some point in the future, but only if Congress passes orphan works legislation."

Why monetize unclaimed works before getting permission?
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, wrote on his blog: "Given that everyone is so positive that you CAN find rights holders for most of these unclaimed works, why not go out and find them first, then ask if they want to be included. Surely the settlement can generate enough money from books with known authors to fund that without having to include these books at the outset?"

"The Registry is trying to lay claim and charge for, monetize, works that have never been claimed and this is what causes the whole thing to be broken," Kahle of the Internet Archive said after the Commonwealth panel. The Internet Archive has been scanning books and archiving all types of media for years, but on nonprofit resources.

However, Clancy said most of the unclaimed works will eventually be claimed and predicted there would be legislation soon to resolve the matter. "We will have orphan works legislation before this thing is over ... [because of the settlement] people are pushing to resubmit it as we speak," he said.

Samuelson and other critics are worried that as a result of Google having the only comprehensive collection of out-of-print books, there will not be competitive pressure on the company to keep prices fair. "The risk of price gouging over time is very high and universities in particular have experienced excessive increases in prices of scholarly journals over the last few years," she said.

Samuelson reiterated her concerns about pricing at the Commonwealth panel event, adding that she doesn't think Google will price gouge in the immediate future, but that it could happen in the longer term. Clancy made no assurances but mentioned something about there being alternatives, like physical books, and that "the platform is there to provide the protections."

"The settlement is a total failure to address most of the problems the Justice Department raised and virtually all the problems raised by U.S. objectors and amicus [friends of the court] briefs," said Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer and leader in the Open Book Alliance, whose members include nonprofit author groups, library institutions, and Google rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo.

"If we are going to allow Congress to [pass a law granting others licensing rights for orphaned works] why do we need a settlement?" said Reback. "The right way to do this would be to have Congress deal with it; not for Google to give itself a preference."

Of the settlement's handling of orphan works, James Grimmelman, a professor at New York Law School, writes on his blog that "It's a very clever hack. I have my doubts whether it's legal." Google remains "the only game in town" for unclaimed works, he said. (For more on the copyright implications of the settlement read Larry Downes' guest column on CNET News.)

The amended settlement also does not provide privacy protections for consumers that privacy advocates and authors including Michael Chabon, Bruce Schneier, and Jonathan Lethem had requested.

"One of our core privacy concerns with the settlement has been that reading records are not properly protected from disclosure to the government and third parties," the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California wrote in a blog post. "Readers should be able to use Google Book Search without worrying that the government or a third party is reading over their shoulder."

In response to Samuelson complaining at the Commonwealth event that the revised settlement offers no privacy protections for consumers, Google's Clancy said, "We didn't think the settlement was the right place to discuss this."

Updated 8:20 p.m. PST with Google, Internet Archive, and Samuelson comments at Commonwealth Club event Monday night.

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Larry Downes' bio below.

A month and a half after Google and the leading trade associations for publishers and authors withdrew their proposed settlement over Google Books, the parties on Friday filed a new version of the agreement.

The hope is that this new draft (now weighing in at 165 pages) will respond to the many objections to the original version, particularly those from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Significantly, the revised settlement excludes books published outside the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. And the registry that will collect royalties on sales of out-of-print works whose copyright owners are unknown will now act independently of Google. Some privacy concerns were also clarified. But I doubt that those who screamed the loudest will be satisfied with the changed document.

What the objectors--including most of Google's competitors, regulators, and a gaggle of overwrought law professors--seemed to dislike most was Google's audacity, specifically in using technology to solve a problem created by lawmakers in the first place. New objections, more attenuated and jargon-laded, will no doubt follow, until federal judge Denny Chin grabs the reigns of this increasingly unwieldy class action and steers it to resolution.

Let's back up. In 2004, Google began to scan all of the books languishing in some of the world's leading research libraries. Today, Google Books lets anyone search the contents of these libraries for free. For books whose copyright has expired, Google makes the entire text available and downloadable.

Citing possible copyright infringement, however, Google was sued in 2005 by the leading trade associations for authors and publishers. After three years of intensive negotiations, the two sides worked out a detailed settlement. The original agreement seemed to create a cheap and elegant solution to a problem that has plagued scholars, librarians, and ordinary readers for decades: how to provide low-cost access to books no longer in print but whose copyrights have yet to expire.

But then the objections began pouring into Judge Chin's chambers. The problem, according to most of these complaints, is that the agreement gives too much market power to Google over out-of-print books. How's that again? Out-of-print books, by definition, are those for which there is no market today, nor likely to be one any time in the future.

Thanks to advances in information technology, it may now be cost-effective to offer these works to their limited, if passionate, audiences. Google Books, in any case, is investing heavily to develop these markets. The revised settlement makes it even easier for potential competitors to do the same without having to rescan the old books. But let's not kid ourselves. It will be some time before we know if there's any revenue here worth fighting about, let alone an antitrust problem.

The real problem, which no one has the guts to face directly, is the sad state of copyright law. Copyright grants authors and their publishers the exclusive right to make copies of their work in order to encourage the growth of intellectual life, from novels to research papers to songs to cookbooks.

Lawmakers are supposed to balance that powerful control--in this case, a legal monopoly--against the value to consumers of letting information flow as freely as possible. That's a goal that has become fantastically easier and cheaper with the creation of the World Wide Web, high-resolution cell phone displays and other portable reading devices, and the digitization of just about all the world's information, much of it thanks to companies like Google.

Yet even as information distribution gets cheaper, entertainment industry lobbyists have pressured lawmakers to extend the copyright monopoly to absurd levels. The "fair use" exceptions have been all but eliminated through strategic litigating. Civil and criminal penalties for infringement are regularly enhanced, as recently as last year. In the only case of thousands brought by the recording industry that actually went to trial, a file-sharing user was found liable for nearly $2 million dollars in damages for sharing 24 songs. Yet the Obama Justice Department filed a brief supporting that penalty as "rational."

Worst of all, consumers must wait longer and longer for works to enter the public domain, where they can be freely copied, adapted, and sampled. As recently as 1909, a copyright lasted only 28 years in the United States. Since then, Congress has repeatedly extended it and applied the extensions retroactively. Today, copyright runs from the moment of creation until the death of the author, plus another 70 years.

Acknowledging that the U.S. Constitution requires copyright to be for "limited times," the late Congressman Sonny Bono once proposed changing the term to forever minus a day. No copyright on work produced by Disney has ever expired. That's not a coincidence.

Since most published works never make a profit, however, millions of books still under copyright are now out of print, existing only in the ghost towns of a few dingy library stacks. The authors of a growing number of these works are long dead, having made no provision for the inheritance of their rights. Since these books cannot be copied without permission, and no one knows who can give that permission, they inhabit a kind of intellectual limbo. Copyright scholars refer to them as "orphan works."

So far, Google has scanned 10 million books. Two million are old enough to be free of copyright, and another 2 million are still in print (Google has made separate agreements with the publishers of those books). The other 6 million are in copyright but out of print, many of them orphans. Thanks to the madness of recent copyright extensions, that category is certain to get bigger all the time. Congress has tried and failed for years to pass legislation dealing with orphan works.

In large part, the revised Google Books settlement would bring these books back to the world of the living. How? Copyright owners who don't want to participate in the deal must opt out of it, impossible by definition for orphan works. (The opt-out, to dispel a common myth, can occur at any time, not just before the settlement is approved.) So Google would have the right to make these books available in digital form, with any revenue going to a new nonprofit registry that will attempt to locate and compensate the owners.

Tellingly, the objectors say little to nothing about the impact of the settlement on consumers, who already benefit from Google's efforts and would benefit even more, if the agreement is approved.

The interests of information users ought to be the top priority of U.S. copyright officials, but Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights, condemned the original agreement. She spoke on behalf of the theoretical owners of orphan works--authors and publishers, in other words, who were given a powerful monopoly and then abandoned it. Peters accused Google and the organizations who sued the company of conspiring to execute an "end-run around copyright law as we know it."

There's the real problem. Copyright "as we know it" is a disaster and an embarrassment. Rather than complain about the ingenuity, leadership, and careful diplomacy of Google in trying to clean it up, why doesn't Peters focus on the job she was hired to do: urging Congress to bring copyright law in line with the realities of the 21st century?

Congress and its enthrallment to entertainment lobbyists created this mess. Reset the balance of copyright to something fair for authors and consumers, and all the objections to the Google Books settlement evaporate.

A revised settlement filed late Friday over Google's right to scan digital books places additional limits on the company.

The settlement allows out-of-print books from only English-speaking countries to be scanned, restricts the ways that Google can make money from scanning and digitizing out-of-print books, and requires a registry to seek out copyright holders who do not come forward.

The amended settlement comes after Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted on Monday a deadline extension to the parties to try to resolve issues that the U.S. Department of Justice had with the original October 2008 settlement.

The settlement now applies only to out-of-print books registered with the U.S. Copyright office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada--countries that have a common legal heritage and similar book industry practices--according to the FAQ on the revised settlement.

Each of those countries will have an author and a publisher seat on a Book Rights Registry board, a nonprofit that will be responsible for paying authors and publishers.

The Book Rights Registry will be required to search for copyright holders who have not yet come forward and to hold revenue on their behalf, under the revised settlement. An independent fiduciary approved by the court will make decisions regarding unclaimed works.

Readers will be able to preview and purchase books, institutions can buy subscriptions, and libraries will have free access at designated terminals. The revised settlement limits Google's future business models from the works to individual subscriptions, print-on-demand, and digital downloads. The company will need to get approval from the registry's board and provide notice to all claiming copyright holders before implementing any of the business models.

Copyright holders can now choose to make their books available for free or allow reuse under Creative Commons, as well have the option to modify or remove restrictions placed on Google's display of their books, such as limits on the number of pages that users can print.

The settlement still allows any bookstore to sell online access to out-of-print books covered by the settlement, including unclaimed books. Copyright holders will still receive 63 percent of such revenue, while retailers will keep the majority of the remaining 37 percent.

A portion of the revenue generated from unclaimed works may be used to locate copyright holders after five years and will not be used for the registry's general operations or redistributed to other copyright holders as previously planned. After 10 years, the registry may ask the court to distribute these funds to nonprofits.

The Book Rights Registry will now hold unclaimed funds for 10 years, instead of five. After that time, the funds will go to nonprofits in the English speaking countries.

The Registry also is prohibited from sharing pricing information with anyone but the book's copyright holder, according to settlement. Authors and publishers will have until March 31, 2011, to make claims for the $60 to $300 per-book-digitization payments, and have until March 9, 2012, to remove works from Google's database.

The revised settlement makes it clear that Google will not display any content by default from works that are for sale as new internationally, which are considered commercially available. In addition, it includes language that specifies that Google will not share any private information with the registry without valid legal process.

Authors and publishers from outside of the covered countries can still enter into promotional and revenue-generating programs through Google's Partner Program.

"The changes we've made in our amended agreement address many of the concerns we've heard (particularly in limiting its international scope), while at the same time preserving the core benefits of the original agreement: opening access to millions of books while providing rightsholders with ways to sell and control their work online," Dan Clancy, Google Books engineering director, said in a statement.

"We're disappointed that we won't be able to provide access to as many books from as many countries through the settlement as a result of our modifications, but we look forward to continuing to work with rightsholders from around the world to fulfill our longstanding mission of increasing access to all the world's books," Clancy said.

According to Google's FAQ, the court will create a timeline for the revised settlement, "which will likely include a notice period, an objection period, and a final fairness hearing in early 2010."

Google is seeking rights to scan and display out-of-print books as part of a larger effort to create the modern day equivalent to the Library of Alexandria. Opponents argue that the settlement puts too much power in the hands of one company.

In September, the Justice Department voiced objections to the proposed settlement on antitrust grounds. The agency was bothered by the fact that Google and the Books Rights Registry, a nonprofit that will pay authors, would have sole control over the pricing of institutional subscriptions to the digital library. The DOJ also raised questions about whether the proposed settlement complied with Rule 23 of the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure, as well as copyright law in general.

Google first announced plans in 2003 to make books searchable and has hit snags with its efforts since, being sued by authors and facing opposition internationally.

The National Federation of the Blind is applauding the decisions of Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison not to Amazon.com's Kindle DX as a textbook replacement.

Kindle DX

(Credit: Amazon)

The universities cited the Kindle's inaccessibility to the blind as the problem.

The federation said Wednesday that while it appreciates the Kindle's text-to-speech feature, the "menus of the device are not accessible to the blind...making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon's Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX."

For its part, Amazon believes in the Kindle's potential. An Amazon spokesperson wrote in an e-mail that "With a few modifications, Kindle has the potential to be a true breakthrough product for the blind, and we're already working on it. We're excited about it."

According to the federation, the University of Wisconsin-Madison experimented with the Kindle in upper-level history classes.

"The big disappointment was learning that the Kindle DX is not accessible to the blind," Ken Frazier, the University of Wisconsin-Madison director of libraries, said in a statement. "Advancements in text-to-speech technology have created a market opportunity for an e-book reading device that is fully accessible for everyone. This version of the Kindle e-book reader missed the mark."

Frazier added that a suitable device would include better "accessibility, higher-quality graphics, and improved navigation and note-taking. I think that there will be a huge payoff for the company that creates a truly universal e-book reader."

Pamela McLaughlin, director of communications and external relations at Syracuse University, said in a statement that her school bought two Kindle DX units to see if it could replace hardcover textbooks and course materials.

Although students are still evaluating the devices, she said, the university has "no plans to purchase any more of these units in light of the fact that they are inaccessible to blind students. If Syracuse University decides to use e-book technology on campus, we will require technology that can be used by all of our students, including those who are blind."

Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, said his organization commends the universities' rejections of "broad deployment of the Kindle DX in its current form because it cannot be used by blind students and therefore denies the blind equal access to electronic textbooks."

Mauer pointed out that the federation does not oppose electronic textbooks and believes that "they hold great promise for blind students if they are accessible."

Updated at 10:14 a.m. PST to include Amazon comments.

Guess what? Google has too many Spocks and not enough Captain Kirks.

That was one of the many interesting insights BoomTown gleaned from a video interview Wednesday night with well-known New Yorker scribe Ken Auletta, who has just written a new book, "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It."

This "lack of emotional intelligence" at the search giant, said Auletta, reminded him a lot of the subject of one of his previous books: Microsoft.

Oh, the delicious irony!

Auletta was feted at a lovely party on Wednesday night for at the San Francisco house of Common Sense Media's Jim Steyer, where a range of Google execs, Internet folks, and fans gathered to talk about the book.

It's all about Google, its history and, most importantly, its impact on the world. And, how you look at the powerful search giant depends entirely on whether you are the changer or the changed, as Auletta stresses in multiple anecdotes in the book.

Traditional media, for example, has certainly been mucho irked of late about the impact of digital technologies on their businesses and has not been shy about casting blame most heapingly on Google's Silicon Valley plate.

And the government regulators are also giving the company the hairy eyeball, much as they had previously done to Microsoft.

Auletta and I talked about all that and more in the video interview here, in which he noted that he told Googlers at a talk at their adorkable Googleplex HQ in Mountain View, Calif., on Wednesday that they needed to focus less on being engineering brainiacs and more on trying to understand how to deal with fears of their growing power. (You can see interviews I did with guests here too).

Below that is one of the disturbing number of mash-up music videos about "Star Trek" buddies, the highly illogical Kirk and the Vulcanish Spock, the geek bromance of all time:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.

Kindle book buyers can now read their books right from their PCs without having to buy a Kindle reader.

Amazon onTuesday made available its new Kindle for PC, free software that lets Kindle customers read their e-books on tablet PCs, Netbooks, notebooks, and other personal computers.

The software can be downloaded from the Kindle for PC page. The quick installation sets up the reader application, prompting you to log in and register with your Amazon account or create a new one. After logging in, you can download books that you've already purchased at the Kindle store or click on a link to buy new ones.

Microsoft had demonstrated the Kindle for PC software at its Windows 7 launch event in New York last month.

(Credit: CNET News/Lance Whitney)

Kindle for PC offers many of the options you'll find on a Kindle reader. You can increase or decrease the size of the font and change the width of the page and words per line. You can navigate from one page to another by clicking on the Next or Previous Page arrows or by using the scroll wheel on your mouse. You can jump to a specific page, such as the cover, table of contents, or last page read, and bookmark a specific location for future reference. You can also read notes and highlights created on your Kindle device, but you can't create them on Kindle for PC yet.

People with a Windows 7 multitouch PC can zoom in or out of a page by pinching it with your fingers.

Amazon has also tapped its Whispersync technology to automatically save and sync bookmarks across multiple devices. So you can read a book up to a certain page on your Kindle device and then automatically jump to that same page on your PC to resume reading where you left off.

"Kindle for PC is the perfect companion application for customers who own a Kindle or Kindle DX," Ian Freed, vice president, Amazon Kindle, said in a statement. "Kindle for PC is also a great way for people around the world to access a huge selection from the Kindle Store and read the most popular books of today even if they don't yet have a Kindle."

Amazon plans new features for the next edition of Kindle for PC. The company said it will offer the ability to create notes and highlights, search for words or phrases in your books, and click on an image to zoom in or rotate it.

With the launch of Kindle for PC, Kindle books can now be read on Kindle readers, the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and personal computers. Kindle for the PC is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, and XP. A Mac version is coming soon, promises Amazon.

The Nook

(Credit: Barnes & Noble)

Demand is so strong for the Nook that Barnes & Noble has begun telling new customers not to expect delivery of the soon-to-be-released e-reader until the second week of December.

When the nation's largest bookseller unveiled the device in October, customers placing early preorders were told they could expect the Nook to ship by the end of November; customers placing preorders now are being told they can expect shipment by December 11. The new shipping date was first reported by Brighthand.com.

A Barnes & Noble representative confirmed the December 11 shipping date but disputed the characterization of the new shipping date as a delay.

"Like with any hot, new consumer device, the sooner you order it, the sooner you receive it," said Mary Ellen Keating, senior vice president of corporate communications and public affairs. "We had high expectations for the Nook and couldn't be happier" with preorder sales. However, she declined to say how many of the e-readers had been preordered.

"We are working hard to meet demand for the holidays," she said.

Earlier this month, start-up Spring Design filed a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, alleging the bookseller misappropriated its trade secrets in the design of the Nook. Spring Design had announced its Alex e-reader just days before Barnes & Noble formally unveiled the Nook. Both e-readers use the Android operating system and combine an e-ink screen with a color touch screen. It seeks both monetary damages and a halt to sales of the Nook.

The $259 Nook, a challenger to Amazon.com's Kindle, will join an expected boom in e-reader sales. In a report released last month, Forrester Research raised its 2009 forecast for e-reader sales in the United States to 3 million units from its previous prediction of 2 million sales. Forrester also expects Amazon's Kindle to command about 60 percent of the e-reader market in 2009, compared with 35 percent for Sony's Reader.

First the Nook (pictured), now the MediaBook?

(Credit: Barnes & Noble)

The question is, who isn't getting in on the e-book reader action these days? Less than two weeks after we met Barnes & Nobles' Nook and just a few days after hearing of tire maker Bridgestone's plans for a flexible e-reader, our friends at Crave UK alerted us that Creative may be hopping on the e-reader bandwagon as well.

Creative fan site EpiZenter.net (so named for Creative's family of popular Zen MP3 players) reports that the company showed off a working model of its first e-book reader, tentatively named the MediaBook, at its annual general meeting Thursday in Singapore. The device reportedly has a touch screen, text-to-speech function, and an SD memory card slot. It will run on Creative's Zii System-On-Chip technology and will be Internet-enabled.

At the meeting, Willie Png, Creative's vice president of strategic business, described Amazon's Kindle as "just another electronic device which displays books in text" (snap!), according to EpiZenter.net, and said Creative's e-reader will harness "videos, pictures, text, and services in one device that supports a media-rich experience." Color Creative ready to join the ever-tightening race to produce that proverbial "Kindle killer."

Creative reportedly is talking to 10 international and local publishers to provide content for the MediaBook, with fiction, newspaper, magazines, education materials, and textbooks all slotted for the device. Singapore Press Holdings, which publishes 17 newspapers and more than 100 magazines, could be one local content provider, saying it is exploring with Creative how to provide a variety of multimedia content, including videos and radio programs, for the device.

No word yet on pricing and availability, but we'll fill you in as soon as we hear.

Wal-Mart Stores has waged an online book pricing war against Amazon.com, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday morning.

Wal-Mart sent the first salvo over Amazon's bow on Thursday when the retail giant announced that it would sell ten highly anticipated books for $10 on Walmart.com. Wal-Mart said Stephen King's upcoming hardcover "Under the Dome" and Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" will be included in that grouping. Wal-Mart's prices include free shipping.

Not to be outdone, Amazon reduced prices to match Wal-Mart's pricing on all 10 titles. That was quickly followed by Wal-Mart's decision to reduce the prices on those books again to $9 late Thursday night. In response, Amazon reduced the prices of all ten titles to $9, as well. The company also reduced the books' Kindle pricing to $9. That's where the prices stand on both sites as of this writing.

Sarah Palin's book is going for $9 on Wal-Mart.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

"If there is going to be a 'Wal-Mart of the Web,' it is going to be Walmart.com," Walmart.com CEO Raul Vazquez told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. "Our goal is to be the biggest and most visited retail Web site."

As viable a goal as that may be for Wal-Mart, it could also cost the online-retail industry dearly. According to the Journal, Wal-Mart is already offering up to 200 best sellers for "50 percent of their list price." That's a figure that most retailers can't keep up with. And as the publication pointed out, it's a price point that could put smaller, less powerful organizations out of business.

"Retailers traditionally pay half the list price for a hardcover book," the Journal wrote in its report. "Assuming that's the case with Wal-Mart, its $10 sale price on 'Under the Dome' represents a 71 percent discount of the $35 cover price, which suggests the discounter will lose $7 to $7.50 on every copy it sells." Wal-Mart might be able to afford that, but other, smaller retailers might not.

But $10 might not be a figure that Wal-Mart picked out of the air. Quite the contrary, the retail giant might have chosen $10 because it's the same price Amazon is currently offering e-books for in its Kindle store. Wal-Mart is, so far, on the outside looking in at the e-book market and the sale of highly anticipated hardcovers for $10 might reflect that.

That said, the company told the Journal that its decision to drop the price of those major titles had nothing to do with the Kindle. Even so, Wal-Mart is a major retailer with loads of cash that it can easily put towards infiltrating a discount book market--electronic or otherwise. A loss on select titles might be worth it in the long run. It could stymie some of the Kindle's impressive growth. That might have been Wal-Mart's intention all along.

What do you think of this? Is Wal-Mart the hero for offering hardcover books at such discounted rates? Is Amazon wrong for matching its pricing? Let us hear your thoughts in the comments below.