Google to sell eBooks

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/technology/internet/01google.html

by qeorge • 17 years ago

44 29 17 years ago

jwvgoethe• 17 years ago

If google can offer for sale a significant fraction of the books they currently serve, I will be happy. However, The current state of the ebook market is unexciting. There are too many proprietary formats, often tied to some specific piece of software. Furthermore, ebooks often do not carry a significant enough discount over the print edition to make up for the restrictions in my opinion. I've come to this conclusion myself after I purchased an ebook, found a passage revelatory and wanted to show it to a friend, but realized that I did not have printing rights. So I was forced to go out and buy a hard copy.

I think ebooks will go the same way as digital music. Once the market becomes mature enough, consumers will demand the wares without draconion DRM restrictions which currently make the e reading experience unpleasant.

stcredzero3• 17 years ago

I think that the analogies between books and digital music will go much further. Books have, until recently, stubbornly stayed in the dead tree format and out of the digital realm. But to see the same synergy with digital technology that music has experienced, they need to go digital as well.

A big part of the problem has been media. Backlit LCD screens are fine for the "workstation" and watching video. But form factors have rarely approached the utility of the sketchbook, (paper) notebook, or scratchpad. The Newton made some inroads here. The high-end Wacom LCD tablets have as well.

To match the utility of paper, the form factors need to be light and thin, approaching the size and weight of a thin standard magazine. They should be always instantaneously available, so should remain on basically all the time. (We can give them 8 hours of charging time back at the desk, but they should still be usable all the while.) The ergonomics of input have to be excellent. If there's a stylus, the feel has to be as refined as the feel of pencils and pens on paper. Interactivity is a must, so long refresh times like with e-ink are unacceptable.

I'm waiting for the day when we can browse and remix our personal libraries with the same facility with which we can browse and remix our music libraries.

zouhair4• 17 years ago

You never been at #bookz or the multitude of ebooks on torrent trackers (text and audiobooks). A lot of people I know read those ebooks on PDAs and listen to them on their mp3 players

jrockway2• 17 years ago

There are too many proprietary formats, often tied to some specific piece of software.

Kindle books are just HTML with the extension changed and some trivial "encryption" on top. The encryption is there to give the publishers some illusion of security -- but if you want to read your books on a computer or other device, it's easy to remove the DRM. Once you do that, open your web browser on the resulting file, and enjoy. (All of your indexing tools that take HTML input files work quite nicely.)

DRM is "evil" and all that, but I don't worry about it since it's so trivial to remove, and always will be. If you can see it, you can copy it.

pj3• 17 years ago

Maybe it's the removing of the DRM that is evil? I mean, it is there to protect the producer and help the producer ensure a stream of revenue and an incentive to produce more content for you in the future.

Would you want a future without content worth buying? Why can't you just live with the DRM?

zouhair4• 17 years ago

Am I wrong or it's illegal to break DRM in the U.S.?

sown2• 17 years ago

So here's a question to consider: is the publishing industry reacting worse or better than the music industry?

pj3• 17 years ago

Google has scanned more than seven million volumes from several university libraries. ... The settlement ... provides for a way for Google to sell digital access to the scanned volumes.

The authors and publishers said Google is stealing our content, violating our copyright. So Google replied that their intent is benevolent. They didn't want to harm the publishers or take their money, they didn't even want to make money. They said they were scanning these books to create searchable knowledge. Then they strike up a settlement so they can sell those scanned in books? Now they want to compete with Amazon to sell ebooks...

It was a lie from the start. They were just scanning in these books because they knew they'd be selling them one day. They wanted a head start. They lied about the race to give themselves an advantage over Amazon now. This doesn't sound "not evil" to me. Lying is not "good." Maybe it isn't evil, but is "not being evil" the standard now? Shouldn't companies rise above merely "not evil" ??

They lied, they violated the law and the copyright holders and now they are going to be allowed to profit from this illegal behavior.

Their words are not matching their behavior and that is a real negative sign in my opinion.

sown2• 17 years ago

I don't think it's quite like that. Google still has to pay royalties and depending on how much the royalties end up being publishers would probably be happy.

There's no need to make this out to be a conspiracy, though.

berntb2• 17 years ago

>There's no need to make this out to be a conspiracy, though.

You don't generally keep up with the times, do you?

zouhair4• 17 years ago

Even if it's like you say, I don't really see the problem. If it's just a matter of principle I'll agree with you, else I welcome a good and healthy competition between Google and Amazon, and on the other hand I don't think Google can sell those ebooks if the owners of the works are not agreeing.

Edit: I hope they'll make some open ebook reader, with no proprietary stuff like the kindle.

ahoyhere3• 17 years ago

It's not that I don't agree with you, but did you read the whole article?

This ebook selling bit is a new gambit, for new titles, not scanned books.

netsp• 17 years ago

I think one class of mistake we are going to hear all the time is that arguments from music applied to ebooks.

One example is the case for against copyright protection for authors.

jsz0• 17 years ago

I have no interest in buying e-books but, if I did, I would probably continue to use Amazon since I can just order the print copy when there's no e-book version available and have the option of using them on a Kindle. (again, if I wanted e-books which I really do not)

conflux0• 17 years ago

The fact that google is going to leave the pricing structure to the publishers disappointed me. While the flexibility draws in more publishers the publisher acceptable pricepoint will not be competitive with the likes of Amazon.

scorpioxy• 17 years ago

"allow publishers to charge consumers the same price for digital editions as they do for new hardcover versions."

Really? And what happens when customers refuse to pay the same amount? I've always said, that ebooks are still too expensive. Personally, if an ebook is $10 less than a hardcover version, then I prefer it. Otherwise, not much of a difference.

ahoyhere3• 17 years ago

This isn't about selling the books they scanned, but a separate project.

This sounds remarkably like when they tried to reach out and do print, video and radio ads. Even though it looked like something that was related to their core offering, it flopped hugely.

They are overreaching.

To get legs under an ebook-selling project, a company has to devote a lot of resources to promotion, the ecosystem, and making users happy.

That's why Amazon's gotten a much higher adoption rate for the Kindle than Sony has for the Reader. Sony was like "Eh, we'll make an ebook reader" and (seemingly) didn't invest much in the service and ecosystem. The device was fine. But the Kindle whoops its ass because you can order books from anywhere in, what is it, 49 states? And people are used to buying all their books from Amazon already.

I don't really see Google doing things that differently from Sony. They have so many projects going on already that seem neglected.

I think this is a strategy that's going to fail.

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

...at 99cts.

Now that's disrupting.

xcombinator• 17 years ago

hehe, It makes me laugh when they say they expect a "secure format" from google. Once in screen format, it takes a minute to copy automatically a book to a bitmap, and then do whatever you want with it(OCR).

About the same price for a book than an ebook, I suspect they are drunk. People is not going to pay the same price for something that has been manufactured, transported, and stored, for something that cost pennies to sell.Period.

Google to sell eBooks

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