January 7, 2008

Fun with Google Street View

I was playing around with Google Street View. They added greater Boston recently, so I've been hunting down my house, the house I grew up in, and a few other spots. I was prowling downtown Boston and came across a bit of an oddity in and around the Big Dig. To see it, go here and then click on the arrow to go north. Voila! You are in the Big Dig tunnel. Click north again, and you are back up on the street.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:50 PM | Comments (1)

November 13, 2007

Digital Text Community

Jon Noring of Digital Pulp Publishing has announced the start of "The Digital Text Community" (DTC), a public mailing list (on YahooGroups) devoted to serious discussion of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications.

The full group charter is found at the group's home page.

DTC will be lightly moderated primarily to ensure civil discourse, and a separate archive of the discussion will be started and maintained (Jon notes that YahooGroup's default archive is poor, to say the least.)

Jon explained his rationale for starting the group:

The primary reason why I am starting DTC is that there is, surprisingly, no independent and dedicated forum to discuss the various, interrelated technical and non-technical issues of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications, such as books, periodicals, etc.

Current discussion on digitizing paper publications is disjointly spread around in various nooks and crannies. For example, there are forums for particular digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg (e.g. "gutvol-d") and Distributed Proofreaders (which maintains a set of online-only forums.)

And then there are more generalized forums which touch upon various topics of relevance to text digitization, but which is not their main focus. Examples are Book People (which John Mark Ockerbloom is sadly closing the end of the month) and The eBook Community (another YahooGroup which I administer.)

The summary purpose of DTC is given in the last paragraph of the DTC group charter:

"This group is not affiliated with any particular project or organization, but rather is independent. It is hoped this group will be a bridge between the various text digitization projects, enabling information exchange for everyone’s benefit."

This sounds like a great new resource, and I have already subscribed. You can too, here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:27 PM

October 26, 2007

The Discoverability Wars

Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press has some thoughts about how discoverability and other publishing-oriented technologies have put book publishers in the catbird seat.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:52 PM

July 17, 2007

The Dramatic Unity of Huckleberry Finn

ResearchBuzz offers up a nice find: The Ohio State University Press Makes Dozens Of Books Free

The Ohio State University Press has announced that it will be making “certain books” available for free download from its site. (You’ll need a PDF reader.) The books are available at here . There are actually over 60 books here, from Daniel Aaron’s Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819–1838 to John Harold Wilson’s Court Satires of the Restoration. Click on the book title for additional information about the book and PDF files of various chapters. The books I looked at were out of paper print but still had very assertive copyright reminders.What I did NOT see was any way to actually search the content, so here’s the Google query you want: keyword inurl:books site:ohiostatepress.org. Add intitle:book title to the search if you want to restrict your results to a specific text.

If you want to go right to the Huck Finn book referenced in the title, click here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:10 PM

June 7, 2007

Steal this Laptop!

Abbie Hoffman would be proud. Ironically, Abbie's book is flagged as Copyright Protected on Google Books.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:14 AM | Comments (1)

March 24, 2007

OUP on Google

OUP Behaves in the Sandbox

OUP's blog today, in a response to the Financial Times article (subscription required) of a couple days ago, talks about what Google's digitization effort is doing for publishing - and how they are responding to it in-house.

What we publishers have come to realize is that Google and friends have opened up the world to our content by showing us that discoverability and access leads to interest and opportunity. Every major media company is now thinking they need to figure out their share of the digital space.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 AM

March 21, 2007

More Thoughts on Google Books

Michael Cairns from the blog PersonaNonData wrote to highlight two recent articles on Google, one he wrote and one written by his colleague Peter Grabois. Both are skeptical of Google Books, for different reasons, and both articles are well written and very thoughtful. Michael also pointed me to a related article by Peter Brantley, who is one of the truly smart guys in the digital library world.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:00 PM

March 17, 2007

Those eBook Widgets

I haven't hidden my low opinion of Google's book scanning efforts. So I am intrigued that some of the larger trade publishers are stepping up and attempting to do their own digitization--and, notably, establishing their own methods of providing access to the digitized books. The efforts from Random House and HarperCollins have received a lot of attention, mainly because the two companies are such dominant presences in trade publishing. But a lot of the attention has been on their eBook "widgets," the viewing applications they have begun sharing. However, the real story is behind the scenes. Both Random House and HarperCollins are much more interested in having platforms that control the access to the content--allowing models like "look inside the book" and other kinds of partial access. To understand these offerings, you need to look beyond the widgets themselves.

As far as I can tell so far, these are really for promoting the print books and not for selling eBooks per se. The Random House site says, “The Random House Digital Page Initiative is an on-going project to index, digitize, distribute and set the terms for using book content online. As part of that initiative, Random House has developed Insight, a service that gives search engines and online retailers access to digitized book content over the Web.”

Both offerings are addressed to balance the need for access and publisher’s concerns about control and insight into how the content is used. For example, Random House’s documentation says, “For the publisher, Insight is a tool to get the publisher's digital content onto the websites of retail partners, search engines, publicity outlets, authors, blogs, and readers … the publisher's digital book content remains in the hands of the publisher. It … implements business rules to guarantee that ownership and management of the digitized content remains with the publisher; and it manages access to the content from third-party websites.”

Also:

In terms of differences:

The HarperCollins/LibreDigital widget is based on the NewsStand technology. According to Todd Eckler, VP of Sales at LibreDigital, the primary difference with the HarperCollins version over the NewsStand version is more functionality for DRM and reporting.

The Random House widget is a Flash client. It looks an awful lot like Adobe’s Digital Editions, but it does not seem to be the same technology.

To my best understanding at this point, they both display PDF files, though LibreDigital does accept other formats (including OEB), and the Random House widget accepts all kinds of image formats as page files (their specifications say at one point “JPG, PDF, indexed text, etc.” and “jpeg, gif, png, pdf” at another point.) So I think it is fair to say that the LibreDigital tool is more of a conventional eBook platform that looks to ingest whole eBook files and the Random House tool is more of a page-turning device that is happy to manage and display page files of several different formats. Having said this, I can’t imagine too many people handing over a bunch of, say, JPG files to Random House with some kind of page manifest, but I may be missing something.

Interestingly, the early reviews on the industry blogs really seemed to favor the Random House widget. Fran Toolan of Issues in Publishing wrote of Random House’s widget, “It also has multiple features not found in Harper's. Some of the features include, displaying multiple sizes, searching for text strings inside the widget (using a Google text search), and offering ways to buy the book.” And C. Max Magee at Millions Blog wrote, “At a glance, the Random House offering is much nicer to look at, faster to load pages, and offers additional functions like search. So, if you want to know who winds the first round of the “Widget Wars,” Random House does.”

I think the real question down the road is who wins the next few rounds of the digital access wars. Google fired the first shot, but the major publishers are firing back--and trying to bring the smaller publishers along as allies.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:20 PM | TrackBack

January 28, 2007

File this Under "Not Exactly News"

Dear Author has seen the Vision of the eBook Future via Google and Random House and It Stinks

In 2004, Google announced its plan to scan every book printed. They began working with university libraries such as Harvard, University of Michigan, and Oxford. This caused the publishing industry some great consternation because an author’s work …

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:56 PM

January 9, 2007

The Search Continues for Steve Arnold

Steve Arnold weighs in on search in the government sector.

Steven Arnold, a search engine consultant with a government focus, discusses how to get enterprise search to work and the benefits of FirstGov’s approach to indexing. Steven Arnold got an early start on search engines. In 1971, his employer, Halliburton Co., assigned him to digitize the company’s technical reports in order to make them searchable. He has worked in the field ever since. In the past decade, he has moved over to consultancy, starting his own practice, Arnold IT. In 2000, he helped generate the technical plan for the first iteration of the General Services Administration’s FirstGov government search engine. (His son, Erik Arnold, currently works on FirstGov.) More recently, he launched the Google Government Report, a newsletter and electronic information service offering tips on how to be better recognized by Google. We caught up with Arnold to get his views on what is happening with both enterprise and Web search.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM

December 27, 2006

Goodbye 2006, Welcome 2007

Apoorv Durga says goodbye to 2006 and welcome to 2007 in the world of portals and content management.

2006 has been an exciting year for content technologies. Based on some of the interesting happenings, the following themes (in no particular order) have emerged that might have an impact on this space in coming years: Standards, or the lack of them was evident.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:00 AM

December 14, 2006

IBM, Yahoo Partner on Free Enterprise Search for SMBs

This strikes me as an interesting challenge to Google appliance, and a nice way for Yahoo to penetrate the enterprise with a well-regarded partner.

The free search package allows small and midsize businesses to search corporate file servers and databases as well as the public Web.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:35 AM | TrackBack

December 11, 2006

More on Microsoft Book Search

Again, as I mentioned in another entry, I have not looked too closely at it yet, but Microsoft Book Search has nice behaviour in the basic interface, and the image in this page was clearly digitized with some care.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:45 PM | TrackBack

December 7, 2006

Microsoft Book Search

Microsoft has launched its book search product. My initial reaction is mixed, though I haven't spent much time with it yet. On the one hand, it doesn't seem to work in Firefox (get used to seeing the word "Loading..." if you try to launch it) and it is really slow to start, even in Internet Explorer 6 (I haven't tried it in Explorer 7 yet). On the other hand, the interface for browsing a found book is much more attractive than Google Book Search and the scanning, at a quick glance, seems to be of a signficantly better quality than that on Google Books. Of course, beating Google Books on scanning quality is not exactly difficult.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:50 PM

December 2, 2006

The Google Book "Nightmare"

Also from if:book, count Brewster Kahle among the people who are not fans of Google Books.

"Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare.".

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:15 PM

November 10, 2006

Digitization at HarperCollins

If you are curious what HarperCollins is doing in terms of digitizing its content, this presentation (PDF) from the Frankfurt Book Fair spells it out some. HarperCollins is being aggressive with this. They cited the costs of digitization as an element in their recent disappointing quarterly profit, and clearly are committed to the efforts.

In addition to lower sales, [HarperCollins CEO Jane] Friedman attributed the drop in profits to continued investment in digital and global projects. HC has now digitized 12,000 titles as part of its digital warehouse, and during the quarter it converted 125 books to its new Browse Inside feature, which enables consumers to search HC books from the company's Web site. Friedman estimated HC will be adding 200 to 500 titles a week to the Browse feature. The company's Digital Media Café also launched in the period. "I remain excited by the digital world," Friedman said. HC's China initiatives also ate into profits in the period.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:33 PM

September 8, 2006

Note to Google Books

When you scan a page that has an illustration with an overlay, lift the overlay up so the illustration is actually visible. Oh, and make the book square on the scanner bed so the page is not crooked. Oh yeah, and decide whether to scan the whole book in color or in black and white. Of course, you should also be sure there isn't some bizarre problem with the scanner first. And, needless to say, if the scan you end up with is completely nonsensical, you might not want to include it.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:40 PM

September 2, 2006

Google Books Allowing Downloads: Blah, Blah, Blah

There was quite a buzz about Google allowing people to download PDFs of public domain books as of this week. Almost everything I read was incomplete, or wrong, and there was plenty of irrational exuberance. To me, any discussion of downloadable public domain books has to include Project Gutenberg, but few of the articles mentioned it. So much of the coverage is fawning, which means the project is doomed. It really is the dot.bomb era all over again. I suggest the cheerleaders start here and see how shoddy and incompetent the work is.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:18 PM

August 26, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

I don't know, but maybe they were going for an aerial view here? Every page I looked at in this book is badly done. Is this what some of the top libraries in the world want done with books that are nearly 200 years old? And when Willis A. Boughton donated this book to the Harvard libraries in 1933, did he expect the book to be manhandled this way? I go back to an earlier post I wrote, reflecting on how the president of the University of Michigan gushed about the role of Google Books in historic preservation. Did it ever occur to anyone that Google might know how to build a search engine, but they might not have a clue about how to handle and digitize books?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:28 AM | TrackBack

August 20, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

The thing I have noticed, scanning so many pages of Google Books, is that when the scanning of a book starts to go wrong, it goes very, very wrong.

But, hey, they've got hyperlinks!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:06 PM

August 12, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

Check this out. And then the frontispiece photo, where they apparently failed to notice--or failed to do anything about--an overlay over the page. Once again, Project Gutenberg does it much, much better.

UPDATE: It also occurs to me that Google Books does nothing for the visually impaired, but other eBook efforts do.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:37 AM

August 11, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

Oy vey. Start here, and keep paging forward. Maybe the person scanning this book was drinking.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)

August 10, 2006

But Did Anyone Bother to Check if Google Has a Clue?

University of Calif. Joins Google Book Scan Push

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:54 PM

August 6, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

One could guess at what this page is supposed to include on it, but, then again, maybe not. All of which makes this sound like a good idea.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:22 PM

July 17, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

I subscribe to an RSS feed from Project Gutenberg, which tells me about titles that have been added to their library. One caught my eye today, Fairies and Folk Tales of Ireland, by William Henry Frost. Check out the Frontispiece art, which is just below the fold when you open the eBook. Now check out the same image on Google Books. Heck of a job, Google!

UPDATE: Goodness. What happened to this page? And this one? Those darned verso pages.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:02 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 7, 2006

Amateur Hour at Google

The more I look at Google Books, the more dismayed I am. Check out the following book about Nathaniel Hawthorne, An Analytical Index to the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: With a Sketch of His Life. Start here, and then scroll back a page. Why don't they just throw up on the scanner and reproduce that instead?

And what to say about this page? And this one? Do the people at Harvard know their books are being manhandled like this?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 15, 2006

Google Hacks Together a Shakespeare Site

The eWeek headline was actually Google Launches Shakespeare Site, but like so many of Google's efforts, this is thrown together. I had heard a presentation recently about the flaws in Google's scanning processes. It was done by Lofti Belkhir, whose company, Kirtas Technologies, has amazing book scanning equipment that Google does not use. (Watch the video here, if you have never seen this kind of technology at work. It is very cool.)

Belkhir showed some woefully bad examples of scanned pages at Google Books. I have written about this before, but Belkhir's arguments were really good and his examples were hilarious--especially the visible thumbs on scanned pages. So I decided to take a quick look at the Shakespeare titles in the Google site, and the work is very poor. See the following examples, found in only a few minutes of browsing:

-- Check out the smeared type at the bottom of this page, where the book was clearly not placed on the scanner properly.
-- Look at the faint type in several points on this page. You can find hundreds of pages like this, as they clearly have no method of ensuring consistent quality in the scanning. Note the smeared type at the bottom of this page as well.
-- In fact, just keep advancing through that book, and pretty much all the pages have the same problems.
-- Then you get about ten more pages into it and you have this page, which is much more grey than black and white, as if they made a one-time adjustment in the darkness setting and then went back to the setting where the type is barely legible in places.
-- Check out this page, also with the darkness setting set to high, where you can also see the outline of the text from the opposite side of the page.
-- Flip through Othello starting about here and notice the switch back and forth on brightness controls.
-- What is at the bottom of this page? Fingers?
-- I like this page. What kind of QA process allows that to slip through?
-- Look at the right-hand margin of this page, and, yes, I think that is a finger at the bottom.
-- Ouch. Keep browsing forward; it's bad.

Want a better collection of Shakespeare? Just go here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here.

Lots of people do far better work than Google at this kind of thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:50 PM | Comments (2)

June 7, 2006

Does Implementing a CMS Help Search Engine Optimization?

Randy Woods of Toronto-based non-linear creations emails with a very solid white paper about this question. I think a new CMS implementation, done well, naturally lends itself to search engine optimization strategies. The mere fact that you are templating the pages encourages you to normalize markup, and that alone can go a long way toward helping the search engines. The white paper has lots of good detail about markup, navigation, site structure, and other issues, and concludes with an interesting case study.

You can download the white paper here (simple registration required).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:18 PM

May 18, 2006

That Google Appliance Again

Count Tony Byrne among the people who are not wowed by the Google appliance.

UPDATE: Neither is Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg. He wrote an in-depth entry about it, and wondered if it were worth missing a Dunkin' Donut for. That's a question I ask myself all the time.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:51 AM

May 15, 2006

7500 Words and Nothing's On

What happens when you write 7500 words about digitizing books without mentioning the words "markup" or "XML"? You get a breathless conclusion that, "the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge."

Why do so many people who discuss this issue ignore the fact that there are better ways to develop digital text, and that the approach of Google, et al, could reasonably be judged to be mediocre at best? All you have to do is look at the average journal publisher today to see much better, more flexible, and more powerful ways to do this job.

And, by the way, this is old news. In fact, it is really old news.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:27 PM | TrackBack

May 11, 2006

Stock Voting Rights Plan Hits Brick Wall at Google

I don't understand a lot of things about Google, but one of the main things is how the stockholders tolerate not having a fair share of the voting rights in the stock. Apparently, some of the actual stockholders feel this way, too, but eWeek reports that a proposal to change the status quo was recently voted down.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:15 PM

March 29, 2006

Speaking of Mark Logic

Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic, offers this comparison of Google and Oracle in his blog.

Google has one primary revenue source (advertising) and a lot of science projects for PR (e.g., Google Earth, Moon, or -- believe it not -- Google Mars). This is just like Oracle which, for a long time, had one working revenue source (the DBMS) and numerous science projects of its own, such as nCube, the network computer (NC), or video-on-demand...

But the big difference is once you put Oracle inside your company it is very hard to get it out. If moving an IT department from Oracle to DB2 is a liver transplant, moving a user from Google to another search engine is a hangnail. The former requires re-writes of applications, reports, and queries. The latter requires a new bookmark and perhaps a thirty-second toolbar download.

Indeed.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:32 PM

March 19, 2006

American Memory

Next time you find yourself thinking about how amazing Google Print is, go spend an hour or two at the American Memory collection and see how wonderful digital preservation really can be.

This is my fundamental arguement against Google Print, Google Video, Google Scholar, and so many other things Google does. The efforts are mediocre at best. There are far better examples out there in every category. People seem to have this uncritical adoration for anything Google announces or does. It reminds me, eerily, of the uncritical thinking people had at the height of the dot.com boom, where any idea, as long as it was on the Web, was a winner. We all know how that turned out.

At this writing, Google has a good search engine and makes a lot of money through advertising. It also has Google Mail, which seems sturdy, but is not exactly revolutionary. It also has the Google Appliance, which is just goofy, if you ask me. (And if you look at Google's total licensing revenues, which includes the Appliance-related revenues, they total just $73 million dollars for the year just finished, with only a 19% growth year-to-year in revenues for the fourth quarter. There are faster-growing enterprise search companies, which tells me that Google is not really impacting the enterprise search market in a signficant way. In other words, I am not the only person to see little value in the Google enterprise applications.)

But enough grousing and back to American Memory. Check out the Walt Whitman notebooks being featured and a personal favorite, the photography collection from Detroit Publishing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:27 PM

March 18, 2006

Google and Amazon

John Battelle suggests Amazon and Google are on a collision course. I get his point, especially given the example he cites. But Amazon has built perhaps the best eCommerce engine in the world, and Google has coughed up dross like this.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:54 AM

February 7, 2006

UMichigan Stands up for Google Print

I am not a fan of Google Print, but some people are. Via John Battelle's SearchBlog, here is a speech (PDF) by Mary Sue Coleman, President of the University of Michigan. She addressed the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers yesterday and explained the university's enthusiastic participation in the program. She makes some great points--and is very eloquent. I share her enthusiasm for digital preservation, but I still don't get why it's Google's job, especially when they are doing a mediocre job of it. If I were President Coleman, I would contain my enthusiasm until better partners--and better processes--come along.

UPDATE: I am clearly in the minority on this one. Peter Morville at findability.org was also very impressed with President Coleman's remarks.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:33 AM

February 4, 2006

Revenue-per-Click

I am spending a few days at Disney World at a client meeting that is focusing on issues like Web marketing, analytics, pay-per-click, and organic search. This morning one of the client's customers offered a case study of how he analyzes the relative success of approaches such as Google pay-per-click, other search engines such as Yahoo, and vertical search engines that focus on his business. Not surprisingly, the most general pay-per-clicks do not necessarily yield the best results. The best results often come from the vertical search engines--the more focused the search, the more specific idea the user has about what he or she is searching for, and so forth. Just by using the vertical search engine, the user has already qualified himself to a certain degree.

For this speaker, the right metric is not cost-per-click but rather revenue-per-click. How much real business follows from a given click through to your site? To accurately track this, he has his salespeople always enter a source for a lead into their sales tracking system. Did it come from Google? Another search engine? A referral from an existing customer? This field is mandatory (in fact, they have to enter this field first before they can create or enter the rest of the customer record). This encourages the sales person to get a very specific idea of the source of the lead, which they also find to be an important element in qualifying the customer.

After a couple of years of analyzing this, the speaker has a lot of proof that the highest revenue-per-click comes from the vertical search engines. Moreover, the general search engines like Google tend to produce too many unqualified leads--and these unqualified leads take additional time from the sales people working with more qualified leads. So this speaker is spending less money on Google pay-per-click going forward and will spend more money on the vertical search engines.

It seems this speaker is ahead of the game, and has arrived at a metric that not enough people are thinking about yet. A quick search of Google (!) gives me 43.4 million hits for "pay-per-click," 7.15 million hits for "cost-per-click," but only 12,100 for revenue-per-click."

It sounds like this in area ripe for more exploration.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:29 AM

January 10, 2006

Google Books: The Other Shoe Drops?

This article seems to suggest yes and, um, no. If they do go into the online bookstore business, they need to do a better job than they have with Google Video. And, once again, a major company manages to misstep on DRM.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:22 PM

January 8, 2006

The Long Tail

OK, I'm slow sometimes. I finally got around to reading Chris Anderson's article, "The Long Tail," some fifteen months after it first appeared and 10 months after Frank Gilbane commented on its relevence to enterprise software. It had caught on enough that I understood the basic idea, but the article is definitely worth reading, as is Anderson's blog. I find myself agreeing with the overall premise and a lot of his ideas, but he is enamored of some things that I am not terribly impressed with. Google Print comes up again and again, and all I can conclude about Google Print is that the search is only decent, the navigation frustrating, and the page rendering is often abysmal (see here, here, and here for examples I found in a couple of minutes of random searching, and I have seen worse). I look at Google Print as a potential model that can exploit the long tail, but a crude and early attempt at something that will be done much better in the future--either by a later version of this product or an entirely different product. Of course, Yahoo and others are in the game too, and publishers such as Random House and Harper Collins seem to want to take things into their own hands. And while the details of these books-on-demand models get worked out, I am sure Anderson will be most directly pleased if you simply buy his upcoming book.

Apart from my nitpicks about some of Anderson's examples, the ideas are important--and I think very important for publishers. Anderson says it best himself in the original article (bolded emphasis mine):

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."

I hear this in different ways all the time from publishers who are ahead of the curve in electronic distribution of their content. Journal publishers who provide sales of single articles have found customers who would never have bought an entire subscription. Speciality publishers who have digitized old manuscripts and back issues of publications are finding small but whole new audiences for their content. The examples--and Anderson's ideas--are compelling and instructive.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:00 PM

December 8, 2005

The eBook Wars

Writing for Publish.com, Ben Charny has an excellent roundup of the online book efforts at Google, Yahoo, and elsewhere.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:52 PM

November 21, 2005

Random House Pushes Back

Google Print, aka, Google Book Search, is not without its challengers. Authors have sued, publishers have sued, and now publishing giant Random House has essentially said, "thanks, but no thanks."

(For some background, the blog, DigitalKoans, has a useful bibliography.)

I called Random House, but they wouldn't comment on the details of any relationship, so what I am about to say is purely speculation. But it seems to me that Random House is saying the digitization and control of their books is their job, and not Google's, and I wonder if this might play out in a certain way.

1. They opt out of the Google program and do their own digitization.
2. They post their digital files on a public web site for wide searching but controlled distribution.
3. They make their own arrangement with Google Book Search, offering limited rights to their own digitized files--or not. They would already be in organic Google results, and Google wouldn't shut them out because they're Random House and represent too much of the book business.

That seems to the kind of control Random House is aiming at. This gives them organic search results in Google, with the specific Book Search results as well, if they want them. It also has the effect of calling Google's bluff. I mean, if Google is only doing this for altruistic reasons, why not let the publishers do their own digitization?

This makes a lot of sense to me. And, Random House aside, I would certainly take this approach if I were a publisher. Publishers have compelling reasons to digitize anyway—for marketing purposes alone, even if eBooks continue to yield small revenues. And the options for digitizing seem to be getting cheaper by the minute. If I'm a publisher, why should I cede the business to Google?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:32 PM

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