Google announced yesterday, at a Publisher’s Weekly forum on “The Book on Google: Is the Future of Publishing in the Cloud,” that it expects to launch its platform to sell books online in “June or July of this year.”
The product, Google Editions, has been much-discussed for some time, but I believe this is the first solid announcement of a time frame for launch. According to Jessica Vascellaro and Jeffrey Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal:
Google says users will be able to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service. It will also allow book retailers—even independent shops—to sell Google Editions on their own sites, taking the bulk of the revenue. Google is still deciding whether it will follow the model where publishers set the retail price or where Google sets retail prices.
While this announcement isn’t about books in the controversial library-scanning project, we may soon have a glance at parts of the distribution infrastructure and book formats that will also be used for books in the scanning program.
From the standpoint of an observer of eBook formats and models, and of their likely impact on library services and business models, the most interesting thing may be that Google seems to intend to make book content available “live” through the browser, rather than by means of some downloaded (presumably DRM’d) file. As a reader, “your” books will “exist” in the cloud, rather than in storage on a particular local device. I haven’t seen any indication of whether this will require a persistent live connection to the Internet for reading, or whether (through a Google Gears-like mechanism?) off-line reading will be possible. If either a conventional download or use of local data via something like Gears is available, I’m not sure how Google will meet demands for copy-protection/anti-piracy measures. And Gears would limit access to devices with conventional operating systems (Macs and PCs) whereas Google presumably wants a service accessible to any device running a browser. So my (completely uninformed) guess would have to be that we’re talking about a product that assumes a persistent connection, whether WiFi, wired, or cellular, to the Internet.
Certainly both much-expanded WiFi networks and the (rather new) ability of the cellular wireless network to effectively handle Web traffic – supporting the proliferation of browser-enabled mobile devices – have changed the landscape from the one confronted by the earlier library ebooks that reference librarians failed to “sell” to most of our patrons (who considered them a low-tier choice for their lack of printability or downloadability). But have we progressed so far that books requiring a reader to be “plugged in,” if that is what these will be, are viable with the mainstream?
Another important attribute of such a service will be that the contents of all these books, including those sold by publishers or authors selling “Google Editions” on their own sites, will be hosted by Google and (like older materials out of the scanning project) float among Google’s data. This will mean, presumably, that they will be not only crawlable for search tools but available to Google for all manner of further semantic processing and data mining. Ad-serving is, of course, an obvious application of this information. But a Google book database of this sort, combined with data on user access to the books, could hypothetically go far beyond even the capacity of an Amazon for building recommender services and other tools to direct users from one resource to another.
This is an expanded version of a post that appeared on the CWRU Law Library’s blog here.
EDIT: Sarah Peretz at ReadWriteWeb quotes Amanda Edmonds of Google as indicating that a cached version of books will be stored locally once they are first accessed. Presumably this means Gears, so I’m still not clear on how it will work for the full range of mobile devices.