Is Publishing Content from a Book to your Site Considered Duplicate Content?

[ThridHour]

It is a book we don't own, either. Would you need to somehow find the original and rel=canonical it? Or is this just all around bad to do? Thanks.

[katemorris]

Are you the only one with permission to publish the content? If not, and there are others, you will need to canonical to where the publisher/owner of the content has the content up. If you are the only approved publisher on the web, you can make others canonical to you, but it'll be a battle.

[ThridHour]

We do have permission.

[katemorris]

Why are you publishing the whole book if it's not yours? If you are going to do that, I'd noindex the content since it's not yours and you don't have permission to publish it from the owner. Or I assume you don't.

[ThridHour]

Does anyone else have anymore insight into this?

[ThridHour]

It's the full book.

[trung.ngo]

The answer to your question depends on how much additional content you're adding around the content taken from the book. If you're simply taking quotes from the book and doing additional analysis, it's unlikely to be considered duplicate content. Here's a great Whiteboard Friday about this very topic: http://moz.com/blog/how-unique-does-content-need-to-be-to-perform-well-in-search-engines-whiteboard-friday

[ThridHour]

Okay, makes sense, thank you. But what if it is just some other random site that has also published the books content (there are many that have published parts of this book) and none are the owner. Who do you canonicalize to, do you just pick one at random? That wouldn't seem to accomplish what Google is after by using the rel=canonical tag.

[Michael_Myles_Himself]

You can easily check to see if it's duplicate content with tools like Copyscape to see if it's published elsewhere. If it IS published elsewhere and you decide to also publish it, then a rel=canonical would be appropriate.

You will also want to get permission to publish anything that don't own the rights to from whoever does own the rights. This is probably the publisher, and you should communicate with them to get permission. You will also want to cite your source so that people know where this content came from, and who wrote it.