gBooks
The future of ebooks may in fact by gBooks. What’s gBooks? It’s Google’s iTunes like interface for books.
No, it doesn’t exist yet but the settlement agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers makes this a likely scenario.
Once this agreement has been approved, you’ll be able to purchase full online access to millions of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future.
Millions of books. That’s right. In one fell swoop Google will have five to ten times the titles currently available on Kindle.
Out-of-print books aren’t actively being published or sold, so the only way to procure one is to track it down in a library or used bookstore. When this agreement is approved, every out-of-print book that we digitize will become available online for preview and purchase, unless its author or publisher chooses to “turn off” that title. We believe it will be a tremendous boon to the publishing industry to enable authors and publishers to earn money from volumes they might have thought were gone forever from the marketplace.
Out-of-print books is the long-tail of the book industry and it makes perfect sense for Google to enable this part of the market. Google has been scanning books for years through the Google Library Project. In 2008, Microsoft finally ceded this space, shuttering its own Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. The only real competitor that remains is Amazon.
Some of you may be wondering why I’m writing about this now. It’s not breaking news, right? Here’s the thing. In the last year Google has finally determined that they need to focus and find new revenue streams, particularly with a maturing search market. Here’s a quick listing of Google projects or properties that have recently been closed.
- Lively
- Google Video Uploads
- Google Notebook
- Jaiku
- Dodgeball
- Google Catalog Search
The latter might make you think that Google is abandoning books. But a quick look at the farewell post shows the exact opposite.
It was a great experiment. Nonetheless, in recent years, Catalog Search hasn’t been as popular as some of our other products. So tomorrow, we’re bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.
And of course, books.
That’s right, Google is very keen on books and not just because it is part of their mission to help organize information. It’s about revenue. The revenue share on consumer sales under the agreement will be 37% for Google and 63% for the publishers and/or authors. Frankly, this seems like a win for both sides.
Unlike Amazon, I doubt Google is going to restrict how and where these books are read. It could be on your desktop or downloaded to your phone. You might read it on Stanza or perhaps on the new G1.
Google sees dollars in books and has been developing book related projects for five or more years. Here’s a prime example. Anyone poking at Google Base will see that it was built with specific book related fields. I happened to have a front row seat for the transition from Froogle to Google Base and it was obvious that books was a top priority.
Now, what do you think happens when publishers begin to see more dollars from their backlist titles via gBooks versus their frontlist titles via Kindle?
gBooks might not be as sexy as Kindle. It’s not a gadget that can be endlessly debated. Instead gBooks is the quiet tropical depression off the coast of Florida that could quickly turn into a hurricane.
January 31st, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I’m praying like crazy that you’re write about Google’s book project. I am blind and can only read books if they are scanned into a computer. The drm on the Kindle makes it impossible for speech to read books from that device. That was such a disappointment to me. Right now, I use a nonprofit service called Bookshare.org that scans books for people who are blind or who have a print reading disability. It’s legal to do this due to an exemption for people like me in the copyright law. Still, because Bookshare depends on volunteers to scan books, it’s growing more slowly than what Google could do. We have around 43,000 books compared to the millions Google can do. Also, since many of Bookshare’s volunteers are people like me who are blind, we’re not able to process things like cookbooks and books with charts very well. Google could open up a whole new world to us while offering convenience to all people who want to read digitally. There are lots of older out of print books worth reading, and I think publishers would open up to Google including more recent books when they start seeing how much money is actually on the table.
February 8th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
[…] month I wrote about the future of gBooks which is contingent on the blessing of the settlement agreement with the Authors Guild and […]
February 11th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
[…] I’m happy to see more momentum behind the digitization of books. I fully believe Google, or gBooks as I’ve come to call it, has the inside track on this business, and by a wide margin, over […]
February 21st, 2009 at 8:56 am
Do you think that college students like myself will be able to just read books on their laptops? That way I wouldn’t need to buy a kindle to stop from lugging all my textbooks around. Is it a library or some sort of subcription type thing or is it a per-book price?
January 3rd, 2010 at 8:25 am
[…] the settlement brouhaha was the warm up act. Look for Google to launch an iTunes like store (aka gBooks) that will be the latest in the least talked about war on the Internet: Google vs. […]