Why are summary services legit?

[AffiliateDreamer]

Hi,

I've ran into some services which I call 'summary' services, they basically summarize popular books so people who are too busy can read a shorter version of the book.

How is this legal? Isn't it a form of plagerism? (of ideas?)

[buckworks]

The legality would depend a great deal on what arrangements had been made with the original author(s) regarding derivative works. The summary service couldn't just help themselves to someone else's work unless it was old enough to be in the public domain, but many authors would be willing to negotiate royalties for other uses of their work.

Derivative works could include summaries, movie or TV screenplays, a line of T-shirts based on literary characters, all sorts of things.

As one example, the Reader's Digest pays generous royalties when they publish their summaries / adaptations of material originally published elsewhere.

[ergophobe]

Although there is the question of when something ceases to be a derivative work. Many book reviews are essentially just summaries and not really reviews and the lifeblood of many academic journals is their reviews.

If you're asking because you want to take part, and since you're an Affiliate Dreamer, you can apply a very simple test: is your summary/review for the purpose of getting affiliate profits by making Amazon sales, or is it to get profits by selling the summary?

If it's neither, and you want to get Adsense clicks, it had best be a real review, and not a summary.