13 March 2006

Google asks copyright holders to sign up for profits with Google Book Search

Online books have always been something of a tricky proposition with questions raised about the user experience, the potential for intellectual property piracy, and actual demand. However great strides have been made recently with improvements made to online encryption and devices released that are more portable and easier to read, and an increasing acceptance among the online communities which have been growing ever since the internet went mainstream.

Offline has seen a great number of changes, as authors no-longer need to go to large publishers with manuscript in hand seeking to get published. Nowadays they host the book online with rights available to the highest bidder. Steven King (www.stephenking.com) has been the poster boy for online books, selling a phenomenal quantity since his first online book back in 2000.

Google's latest move could well change the thinking of authors and publishers alike.

Google states how to use its new service on its Google Book Search site (http://books.google.com / support / partner / bin / answer.py?answer=34596) and seems to be focussing on persuading publishers to sell online access to their copyrighted work, but the implications are wider ranging in the long term. Google's interest in traditional publishers (or, perhaps, in Google parlance, 'content providers') indicates that the search engine might be seen to be positioning itself as a 'meta publisher' - you heard it here first.

Google envisages a user experience which provides a free preview of copyright work, offering access exclusively to signed in account holders and restricting output to merely a display within their browser.

How happy people will be to read an entire novel through their browser is recasting of the old user experience debates and, presumably, will result in cries of the experience not matching up to the quality given by going out and purchasing the real thing. This may well be true, but then if Google can make its Google Book service into a more vital research tool, then there is a strong argument for the validity of freelance articles and research papers being published and ranked solely within Google.

It's the logical next step for a company famed for organising information: information production.

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