GoogleGoogle is to start charging readers for seeing all of some books it’s indexed. “Publishers will set the prices for their own books and share the revenue with Google,” reports the New York Times. “So far, Google has made only limited excerpts of copyrighted books available to its users.” Yep, that in the same article updating info on the Amazon Kindle—see Robert Nagle’s thoughts.

Catch: If previous speculation bears out, the files will remain on the Google servers and not be available on your machine unless the Save function is allowed. Oh, the fun of e-book museums! Nothing wrong with the browser-based approach as an option, but I’d hate for it to be the only one.

Reminder: I’m all in favor of fair compensation for publishers of copyrighted books, a key point of the TeleRead plan. What will be interesting, in Google’s case, is whether the company in time will charge for access or improved access to public domain books.

And related: Google vs. MyLibrary.com, apparently. Fascinating, isn’t—how summer interns’ work at Google can imperil whole businesses? I doubt that MyLibrary.com will roll over and die, but this isn’t the best news for  it. More than ever, Google is the new Microsoft. (Thanks, Tamas.)

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6 COMMENTS

  1. How is it going to work, I wonder?

    Is it just a lending-library? So you pay a micro-fee each time you want to read a page or two of a book?

    Or is it a bookstore? So you pay a fee and get to read that book every time you visit Google Books. Y’know, like that Google Video ‘store’ worked. Or did work, until google arbitrarily shut it down and you couldn’t see any of the videos you had purchased and ‘owned.’

    I sure hope it’s not either one of these. Google has just submitted a patent application for some sort of platform-independent micropayments model, so you could use your cell phone like a debit card. So maybe this announcement ties in with that?

    The way I guess I’d like to see this work would be: pay a price and get to read a book at least once all the way through. Each book you licence (‘buy’ seems to be passe in the new 1984) goes on your bookshelf and automatically keeps track of how far you’ve read, so whenever you’re in line somewhere or on the bus or at lunch, you just whip out your smartphone (iPhone for the rich techies) and log on to the old Google Bookplace, select one of your books from the ‘shelf’ and boom! it opens to the last place you read automatically.

    You should be able to set your own bookmarks and navigate by chapters too.

    This will be a hit in Japan, South Korea, Scandinavia and other advanced civilizations. In the USA? I suspect here it will be mainly a question of price (and whether the book publishers, unlike the music labels and movie and television studios, are able to restrain their rampant greed for overcharging…past history suggests they won’t).

    If you can ‘rent’ a romance book from Google Books for 25 or 50 cents for a onetime read-through, this service could take off.

    But if publishers try to charge $25 for an online view of a book Amazon sells for $17 in hardcover, yours forever and free to resell and pass around … forget it.

  3. I’m not sure what the big deal here is. Google has always said it was going to provide a way for publishers to charge for access to the full text of their books. That was one of their defenses to the publishers’ plaint about Google’s indiscriminate wholesale scanning. It’s not like they’re jumping out from behind a tree and yelling, “Surprise!” about it.

    And imagining that they’re going to start charging for public domain books too is one heck of a conclusion to which to jump, in my opinion.

  4. Chris re Google: I would welcome a statement from Google promising not to charge for improved access to the pub domain books, which it’s branding with its watermarks. As for the basic idea, yes, it has been discussed, but now it’s much closer to actually happening, the reason it made the Times.

    Thanks,
    David

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