Google Working To Make 'iPod/iTunes for Books'

nettamere writes to mention an initiative by Google to take the library online. The end result of the Google Book Search, the company hopes to see a future where they are not merely referring customers to Amazon, but instead offering them the ability to download books directly. According to the Times Online, Google hopes to 'do for books what the iPod did for music.' From the article: "One of Google's partners, Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press, said he foresaw a number of categories becoming popular downloads: 'Do you really want to go on holiday carrying four novels and a guide book?' The book initiative would be part of Google's Book Search service and its partnership with publishers, which will make books searchable online with publishers' approval. At present, only a sample of each book is available online."

Comments

Guide books?

[ChePibe]

'Do you really want to go on holiday carrying four novels and a guide book?'

Yes, I'd much rather have a guide book in my hand that screams "I'm not from here" than a digital version that could run out of batteries leaving me stranded and lost or, worse yet, the look of "I'm not from here" (generally obvious for tourists, anyways) and focusing all of my attention on an expensive looking toy, which is likely to draw in more problems.

I'll take a good old guide book any day, thanks. The novels, however, we can talk about.

Re:Guide books?

[MORB]

Tourists worry too much. This is why you print "don't panic" in large, friendly letters on digital guide books.

I call bullshit!

[tomhudson]

From the summary:

Do you really want to go on holiday carrying four novels and a guide book

I'd rather have a book and not have to worry about internet connectivity, worrying about dropping a laptop or other reader into the bathtub or a pool or a sidewalk, battery life, rain, leaving it behind at a restaurant, getting it stolen, and "sorry, you can't take that in here".

Books "just work" - and if you lose it, you only have the cost of a paperback.

And no, I don't want to read a book on my cellphone, either, even though I watch 3gp ripped episodes of The Simpsons on it when I have to kill some time.

Re:I call bullshit!

[mochan_s]

I lost my Munkres and it cost me $100 to replace it.

Books don't just work. Books don't work where there is no light - e.g. inside a car.

You can store the contents of the entire book in flash memory and not have to worry about internet connectivity. Water related problems also occur with paper books. You can buy AA or AAA batteries almost anywhere. If worst comes to worst, there's always the hand crank. Plus, these new readers don't need power to maintain a page on the display - just to change them or other functions.

The only downside I see is that it seems it's more straining on the eye.

hardware is the problem

[Jett]

Until there is decent hardware to read books on, projects like this aren't going anywhere beyond niche markets.

I love books, I own a few thousand of them and buy new ones every few months. I don't own a single ebook and I doubt I ever will because I've yet to see an ebook reader that was superior to an actual book. The only benefit to ebook readers over physical books are portability and storage capacity. The problem with this is that neither of these are big problems with physical books - if I'm going on a long trip it's not a big deal to bring even a few full sized hardbacks along to read. I don't need to have a library of books on my person at any time, the most books I've ever needed to bring with me anywhere at one time (since high school) was 4, and that was to read on a flight to the other side of the planet. I don't often fly to the other side of the planet.

Re:hardware is the problem

[RattFink]

I really have to disagree with you there and I am sure I am not the only one. Personally the only books I prefer in print is either reference books or those that use a lot of pictures. Any novels that I buy I first look for the ebook version. There are a few reasons why:

1. I don't need to disturb my wife's sleep with a lamp.
2. I can adjust the type size to suit me.
3. I can read a lot faster on the devices.
4. I predominately read during the evening and the backlight makes things far easier to read and a lot more comfortable since I am not constantly adjusting to book for the best lighting as I change pages.

Re:hardware is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

anon because i modded before reading your post.

other than the ones you list, i also like having the following advantages

i have formed a habit of reading till i fall asleep since i got my p910i two years ago

- i don't have to get up or even turn to turn off the light/reading lamp
- the book remembers where i stopped reading. i can carry on reading whenever i get 2,5,10 minutes (good for the climactic parts when reading fiction)
- i can even set it to scroll automatically so i dont have to do anything to keep reading, but i will have to turn it off manuall or lose the other two benefits
- i can carry as many books as i like and they will always take up the same amount of space/weigh the same
- i can annotate, markup, and do anything i like with the content, without damaging the original 'print'
- with mobipocket format i am not bound to a single medium for purchased books. i can read it on my phone, my computer, and any other media that mobipocket may support tomorrow

Re:How would one install the books?

[tomhudson]

Alternatives:

Project Gutenberg - 20,000 books free for downloading - listing in zip format, rss feed of latest releases

... and for other books ...

Interesting - the Kamasutra by Vatsyayana is currently the top book today, yesterday, this week, and for the last month.

What's on the cover?

[adnonsense]

I'll buy one of these electronic guide books provided it has the words "do not panic" in large, friendly letters on the cover.

If not I'll stick to my hard-edged paper travel guides which also come in useful for swatting the local wildlife without ruining the guarantee.

Bad article

[IamTheRealMike]

Ever notice that whenever you read an article in the newspapers about something you know about, it's always riddled with errors? This article made me think of that. In my not so humble opinion, this is just a really, really bad piece of writing. Where do we even start?

Furthermore, since Google is acquiring copyright material at no cost, it seems to be treating books quite differently from all other media. It is prepared to pay for video and music, but not, apparently, for books. The Google defence is that their Book Search system is covered by the legal concept of "fair dealing".

I guess he means fair use, not fair dealing. I'm not sure why he thinks Google is paying for music. This is news to me ...

But the second thing to be said is that I could read whole passages of my books of which I own the copyright. At once a huge intellectual property issue looms.

The ability to quote or use small parts of a work as fair use has always been there as far as I know. This is a new way to use it, that's all. Is this post a looming intellectual property issue now?

Jeanneney says that Google is not what it seems. Its search results are biased by commercial and cultural pressures. He has a point. Try this: go to Google Book Search and enter Gustave Flaubert. The first results are full of English translations of Madame Bovary.

Given that the author points out elsewhere that the American libraries are the first to allow digitization of copyrighted books, I'm not sure why he is surprised by this.

"It's the readers who will have the final say" ... No, it is the teachers who will have the final say. They will determine whether people will read for information, knowledge or, ultimately, wisdom. If they fail and their pupils read only for information, then we are in deep trouble. For the net doesn't educate and the mind must be primed to deal with its informational deluge. On that priming depends the future of civilisation. How we handle the digitising of the libraries will determine who we are to become.

I don't even know what to make of this paragraph. The net doesn't educate? Teachers will dictate how we read books in the future? If students only read books for information, we're doomed? It seems like a random collection of ideas that aren't backed up with logical argument, but exists only to give a punchy ending paragraph.

I admit, I never cared much for The Times, but this sort of writing is below even their standards. It jumps all over the place, gets the facts wrong, generalises too much and is sensationalist in style. Poor show guys.

Re:Bad article

[stubear]

Fair Dealing is a non-US name for Fair Use, so yes, it is a legitimate term and the author was correct to use it. As for Google's use of the books being Fair Use, this is for the courts to decide. There is nothing clear cut about determining Fair Use. Google is not commenting on, critiquing, or parodying the works, they are simply offering a snippet of the work without adding value to the work (no, exposure to the world at large is not an exemption covered by Fair Use).

The hardware is there, just

[michaeldot]

There are some quite capable eBook readers on the market, lead by the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad. Both feature an e-ink screen which uses a matrix of charged dark and light particles at a resolution of around 160 dpi to represent a paper page.

There is no backlight and power is only consumed when the black/white charges are flipped to rebuild the page. The Sony Reader is rated at about 7000 page turns before a battery recharge is necessary. It can be happily left on without worrying about the battery going flat, and owners report in excess of months between charges.

Without a fluorescent backlight, the screen is far easier on the eyes than reading on a LCD screen, provided the ambient light in the room is good. The screen readability is roughly equivalent to a pulp paperback novel. (The texture is smoother but the white is not pure white, rather a very light gray.)

The main limitations are getting the content onto them. The Sony Reader accepts text, RTF, PDF and Sony's own proprietary eBook format, which is what books bought from the Sony Connect store are supplied in (DRM protected).

RTF is generally accepted as the best form to obtain and create books in, as PDF has to be specifically make to the 600x800 screen resolution (larger PDFs scale poorly) and is slower for the device to render.

Buying books from the Sony Connect store is acceptable in theory, but in practice the range is somewhat limited to recent bestsellers and popular classics, and the price is only discounted around 20% from a pulped tree equivalent (for something that is less tangible and less shareable).

Books from the Gutenberg project and other sources can be freely downloaded and transferred as text (plain) or RTF (moderately formatted) although these of course are classic, out of copyright works. More modern books, for which a legitimate or illicit PDF or CHM has been obtained (eg, O'Reilly manuals) can be converted from their original form into RTF, but the process is somewhat tedious and more work than the drag-and-drop method of say transferring a downloaded MP3.

(This is also not helped by poor Sony Connect software (intended to be iTunes for eBooks, and clearly UI inspired by it), which is slow and poorly designed.)

Still, with the Sony Reader and similar devices accepting up to 4GB SD cards, able to store a library of many thousands of books in a quite readable format which is slimmer than a potboiler novel, the hardware certainly shows promise. This is a first generation line of products, so inevitably it will improve for the next rev.

Filling them is the hard part, which is where Google could help.

Re:The hardware is there, just

[kalidasa]

*As a device*, I love my Sony Reader. When I can find a good copy of a good book in a format that works with the software, it's a very pleasant experience (and yes, I do bring it into the bathroom, though not into the tub - but then I would never bring a paperback into the tub, either). Unfortunately, the Connect software is so bad that it makes it pretty damned hard to get the kind of use out of it I would prefer. The Connect bookstore is atrocious: I'd say as much as 10% of the books are mis-categorized (since when is St. Augustine's *City of God* "Contemporary Fiction?"), the selection is terrible (10,000 books? That's about the size of a little airport bookstore - and like the airport bookstore, there are multiple copies of some books), the interface is frustrating (nothing like having two scroll bars, and why do ebookstores insist on listing only 10 books per page - well, probably so it will seem like they have a bigger selection), and the quality is very uneven. Converting anything other than an RTF is irritating - for text, Connect can't figure out when it should run lines together and when it should preserve line breaks, and it doesn't ask, and PDFs are simply scaled rather than being reflowed, so most of my PDFs (like O'Reilly books) aren't readable unless I go through a laborious cut-and-paste process or find some software of dubious legality to decrypt them). There's no mechanism for updating fonts (sure, I could hack into the machine, which runs a Linux, and add them myself, but I don't have time for that), and I need to keep a Windows VM for the Connect software (which looks so bad it might as well have been written in Swing and at least been cross-platform). Finally, there's no commercially available software for formatting your own books, except for a Japanese program sold by Canon for the Librie and a bunch of mediocre freeware that never quite does a good enough job.

iTunes will be the iTunes for Books

[dr.badass]

Call me crazy, but I think iTunes is more likely to be 'iTunes for Books'. Here you have this hugely popular downloadable content store that already sells every other kind of media, versus Google, which, bless their hearts, has never had much success selling anything but ad space.

I don't think it's such big leap--the store is all ready there. iTunes already distributes some PDFs with music albums, and even supports them in podcast feeds. I assume PDF would be used because it's not yet-another-proprietary format, is extremely versatile, supports content protection, and is easy to produce.

The other part of the equation is the devices -- e-reader devices have traditionally sucked much ass through some combination of being bulky, low-resolution, greyscale, poor format support, poor battery life, and by virtue of being yet-another-device-to-carry-around. Regardless of what you think of the iPhone, I don't think you can argue that it's lacking in any of these areas: It'd make a damn-near perfect ebook reader. It already supports PDF, already syncs with iTunes -- it's begging for content. And I'm begging for a page-flipping gesture.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe Apple isn't planning to start selling ebooks -- but unless Google can make buying from them not suck (Google Video, I'm looking at you in disgust), and bring something more than a Blackberry as a reader, I still say Apple is in a much better position than Google is.

Are you sure about that?

[LuNa7ic]

Google hopes to 'do for books what the iPod did for music' Convert them into a obscure format and then riddle them with DRM?