eNews: Amazon UK Says Kindle Sales There Surpass Print; AG Asks Court To Declare GBS "Is Not Fair Use"

PublishersLunch

Amazon UK issued a press release Monday touting the news that ebook sales now outpace all print sales combined, measured across 2012. For every 100 print books sold from Amazon.co.uk (in all formats combined), they've sold 114 Kindle editions. As usual, their ratio excludes free Kindle books (but does include very inexpensive ones, and KDP titles). Amazon US passed a similar milestone as of April 1, 2011. They also declare EL James as Amazon UK's all-time bestselling author, they say, her combined print and Kindle sales eclipsing JK Rowling's total sales at the site. Amazon UK has sold more than 2 million Kindle editions of the FIFTY SHADES trilogy in the past four months.
The wheels of the Google Book Search lawsuit continue to grind forward, with the Authors Guild filing a motion in federal court on July 27 (but made public last Friday, with some portions redacted) declaring again that "the undisputed facts show that Google's unauthorized uses fall far outside the parameters of...fair use doctrine." Repeating past arguments, the AG says "Google's uses are not transformative because they involve verbatim digital copying of entire books and create no new works." (Among their concerns is that "if Google's bulk and indiscriminative copying is found to be 'fair,' other website operators, no matter how small, will also be given sanction to create online databases of books and other works" even though they may "have insufficient security to prevent widespread piracy.")
The Guild seeks summary judgment in their favor (and, lacking that, asks for a jury trial) and asks for the minimum statutory damages of $750 for each book "copied, distributed, and/or displayed" in the Library project. (At the low end of 4 million books for which snippets are displayed, that would be a liability of $3 billion).
Reuters
Filing (via InfoDocket)