I took some time to check various state corporation databases and actually managed to find who Nabu Press is. They are … BiblioBazaar / BiblioLife, a company started by former BookSurge partners after they sold their POD company to Amazon. It is no surprise that they print their POD books through Amazon.

How do I know this – take a look at the SC filing for Nabu Press LLC. The registered agent is for Nabu is:

ERIKA V. HARRISON
18-A CAROLINA
CHARLESTON, SC 29403

A search of the same site, reveals that only two other corporations have the same registered agent – BIBLIOBAZAAR II, LLC and BIBLIOLABS, LLC. BiblioLabs is part of BiblioBazaar as stated on their website.

So the final word is that Nabu Press is actually part of BiblioBazaar. HOWEVER, why did they NOT mention this on their website, and especially in the list of their imprints here? Could it be for legal reasons?

Thanks for notifying us of this situation, which our engineering team is currently addressing. When this issue is resolved, we’ll contact you by email.

Meanwhile, my money is sitting at Google.

Others are reporting this problem in the forums as well, some as far back as January. In addition, the Checkout blog had a post in early January about the same issue which was supposedly fixed.

I am sending a strong worded letter to both Google Checkout and my state regulatory body which regulated money transmitters (with which incidentally Google did not register to obtain a license, which itself might be a problem for them). I will try to post updates if anything happens.

UPDATE #1: Here is a copy of the letter that I send to the Maryland Commissioner of Financial Regulation:

Commissioner of Financial Regulation
CC: Google Payment Corp.

March 4, 2009

Honorable Commissioner,

I am writing to you today to file a complaint against Google Payment Corp., which operates “a money transmission business” [as per the Maryland Money Transmission Act, Section 12-401 (l)(2)(iii)] known as Google Checkout (http://checkout.google.com). This service provides ability to businesses to receive credit card payments from consumers over the Internet. I currently hold a Seller’s account with Google Checkout under merchant ID # XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

As described on their website (http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=134475), Google Checkout deposits the received funds within two (2) business days of the day when the original order was charged. One of my customers charded order # XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX on February XX, 2009 for a total of $X,XXX.XX. The net revenue amount after Google’s fees is $X,XXX.XX and was supposed to have deposited into my account no later than this past Monday, March XXX, 2009. HOWEVER, this money has not been deposited nor has it been listed under the “Payouts” section as being planned to be deposited. I had contacted Google Checkout via email since they do not provide a phone number for support. I had received the following reply:

“Thanks for notifying us of this situation, which our engineering team is currently addressing.”

A futher review of the Google Checkout Merchant Forum (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/checkout-merchants/label?lid=12de2eed05d80c5b&hl=en) showed that numerous other merchants were having similar issues, some as far back as January, and no reply or planned time for resolution was received by anyone via email from Google Checkout. Being a small business, I rely on the quick turnaround of my payments and this unexplained hold up of funds may cause significant damage to my business if it continues. Additionally, I am stymied by both lack of any concrete timeline for resolution. I would like to request your assistance in order to obtain my funds in a timely fashion.

Additionally, I would like to bring to your attention the fact that Google Payment Corp. does not appear on the list of licensed money transmitters on your website which would imply that it is not licensed to do business within this state, thus violating section 12-405 of the Maryland Money Transmission Act. Their competitors, PayPal, Inc. and Amazon Payments, are licensed within Maryland. Additionally, Google Payment Corp. is licensed as a money transmitter in the states of North Dakota, Arizona, Hawaii and Oregon, which implies that they are aware of the need to obtain such license on state level.

Sincerely,
Yakov Shafranovich

UPDATE #2: I have received the following email from Google Checkout customer support. The money has shown up in my Google Checkout account but has not posted to the bank yet. Their reply is as follows:

Hello,

Thank you for your email and continued patience. I understand you are concerned about your payouts from February XX, 2009.

I’ve researched your situation and can confirm that our engineering team has resolved the technical issue you reported. Furthermore, our records indicate that Google should initiated a payout for $X,XXX.XX to your bank account on March XX, 2009. For your reference, I have included information detailing the standard payout schedule below.

UPDATE #3: The money is listed this morning as a pending ACH transfer in my bank account. On a side note, Philip Lessen posted a story of how someone’s AdSense account got closed without explanation, and how the owner was only able to get the money owed to him via small claims court.

UPDATE #4: I have received a letter from the state regulator with an attached reply from Google. Google apologized for the delay but did state that they are of the legal opinion that state registration is not required. They are registering anyway.

I did find something else. When Google registered with states to obtain a local state license for a money transmitter, they did provide some real contact info which you can find here as follows:

Phone: (650) 253-4801
Fax No: (650) 618-2682

This presumingly goes to their regulatory guy who probably have an idea of how to get in touch with customer service.

An important thing to keep in mind: most businesses have some sort of a regulatory body on the state or federal level. Complaining to those bodies usually gets results. In this case, if a payment service be it Amazon, Google or Paypal, is licensed in your state, then your state agency is the best bet. They will first relay the complaint to the company, where it will probably get better attention than via some email form.

Coming soon – new printing vendors, new binding types, and more features!

Over the next few months we will be adding functionality to split, combine and otherwise mash up public domain content from multiple books into a single new book.

Stay tuned!

http://www.publicdomainreprints.org/m

You can search, read and request reprints from your mobile phone. Unlike Google Book search mobile, this supports any mobile phone AND does Internet archive books as well – it includes an experimental mobile reader for Internet Archive books.

Everything is highly experimental, so do not rely on it

Causes of the Financial Crisis (January 29, 2009)
Economic Slowdown: Issues and Policies (January 02, 2009)
Economic Stimulus: Issues and Policies (January 23, 2009)
Medicaid: The Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (February 02, 2009)
Proposed Funding for Workforce Development in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 (February 02, 2009)

As per Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. (36 F. Supp. 2d 191 – SDNY 1999), exact photographic reproductions of public domain works, which seemingly applies to digital scans of books, cannot be protected by any sort of copyright under United States law because they are not considered “original works”. Therefore, we treat as public domain any scan we obtain where the underlying work is in public domain.

Please also see my earlier post and this post.

Paul Durrant in a comment on the TeleRead blog cited a very interesting factoid:

In the US, at least, you can’t claim copyright on an out-of-copyright work just through simple mechanical reproduction of the work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.

According to Wikipedia:

Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), was a decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright because the copies lack originality. Even if accurate reproductions require a great deal of skill, experience and effort, the key element for copyrightability under U.S. law is that copyrighted material must show sufficient originality.

The full text of the decision can be found online right here.
While the original decision was about photos of artwork, the implication for digital archives is enormous. This decision, if applied to sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive, would simply mean that no copyrights can be claimed in any shape or form over digital copies.

HOWEVER, as I have stated in the original post, it remains to be seen whether contractual arrangements such as the terms of service on a website, can obligate someone to follow restrictions on a public domain work.

Stay tuned.

The service is great and I really have no complaints. However, one thing that I ran into is that copyrights are not being checked properly. For example, this book was scanned even though it is currently under copyright because the original library metadata was incorrect. It was published in 1989 while the original metadata points to 1900.

Just goes to show that computers can’t do everything and yes, I did email the Internet Archive.

We also resolved a minor issue with Internet Archive processing for titles that do not have correct file metadata and titles arriving from a new scanning source.

Introducing Scan-On-Demand!

In partnership with the Internet Archive and OpenLibrary.org, the Boston Public Library is excited to announce a new program to allow users and patrons to “Scan-on-Demand”. It’s easy and free! Books are delivered to you, electronically, in 5-7 days

Quick inspection of this page shows that about 42,000 titles available for scanning. For now it seems that only one library is participating so far – Boston Public Library (BPL). This is very exciting news because until now users had no control over what content should be scanned – rather the selections were either culled by librarians or scanned en masse. With this, a scholar or a student looking for a specific book can very easily select what they want and get it online quickly. Hopefully, more and more libraries will be added – it would be very exciting to be able to get a book at Harvard or Oxford scanned, and made available digitally within a week!

The process itself is very simple – find a book from BPL, click the “scan” button and confirm. No money is exchanged but they do ask for a voluntary donation. Here are screenshots of what the process looks like:

Step 1 – Find the book that is available for scanning

Step 2 – Click the scan button and confirm

Step 3 – Your request is confirmed

Step 4 – The book information page now says “Queue” indicating the book will be scanned.

[Shameless Plug] Of course, once the book has been scanned and is entered in the Internet Archive system, you can easily get a printed copy via our service. Just copy and paste the URL on the second box in this page.

• Storage – provides ability to store and serve files, usually unlimited and billed per GB of storage/bandwidth, no minimums. May or may not come with CDN functionality. Some examples:
  • Amazon S3 – the most famous of them all, ability to host in US or EU, no CDN ability but it is coming
  • CloudFiles – this comes from MOSSO, a Rackspace company. Not much info at this time.
  • Google App Engine File Hosting – not a dedicated storage API, but rather a subset of AppEngine functionality allows hosting of static content.
  • Microsoft Azure Blob Storage API – provides similar functionality to Amazon S3, no pricing or general avaibility yet.
  • Nirvanix – focuses on the enterprises market including Windows sharing support, has CDN functionality for an extra fee, provides built-in image and video support.
• Messaging – allows exchange of messages between many systems and computers via a cloud-hosted set of queues, usually a substitute for convention messaging middleware. Much more simplistic and less featured. Some examples:
  • Amazon SQS – the grand daddy of them all, allows to have queues, messages limited to 8KB, expire after 4 days
  • Microsoft Azure Queue API – similar to SQS, no pricing or general availability yet
  • OnlineMQ – an European messaging provider, not much info available
• Database – provides ability to store structured data like conventional databases but less features (especially on search). Some examples:
  • Amazon SimpleDB – best known of them all, however severely lacking on the search aspects.
  • Google AppEngine DataStore API – python only, currently limited in size and number of requests, has issues with unicode. BUT does provide full text search.
  • Microsoft Azure Table Storage API – looks similar to Amazon’s, however not yet available and no pricing information
• Service Hosting – this is a true cloud service – hosting of software services or websites that run seamesly across the entire cloud and scale on demand (unlike Amazon EC2). Examples include:
  • CloudSites – from MOSSO, a Rackspace company. Provides shared hosting in the cloud, flat pricing
  • Google AppEngine – python only, limited release
  • MediaTemple GridService – provides shared hosting in the cloud, flat pricing
  • Microsoft Azure Service Hosting – not yet available
  • Third party services running on top of Amazon EC2 – such as Enomaly, RightScale, Scalr
• Virtual Machine Hosting – provides ability to rent computing time by the hour on a per server basis with ability to run a full fledged virtualized server on Linux, Windows, etc. NO AUTOMATIC scaling or monitoring is included, developers must monitor on their own. Examples include:
  • Amazon EC2 – the grand daddy of them all. No monitoring or scaling built in, allows permanent storage via ESB, supports Linux and Windows.
  • CloudServers – from MOSSO, a Rackspace company. Not yet available.
  • GoGrid – provides cloud servers on demand, supports Windows

One should also keep in mind that Amazon does not charge for bandwidth when transfering data to/from Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. That drives more developers towards the usage of the two services together.