Brad Stone had an article in the New York Times lately about Google’s Google Editions initiative and what it will mean for independent bookstores. Whereas these stores have largely been left out of the e-book trade up to this point, Google is offering Editions to these stores on a wholesale basis, allowing them to host Google Editions e-book stores on their own websites.
Of course, Google will also be selling the e-books from its own site, but given that Google has considerably more experience selling services than products, those interviewed for the article seemed to think Google’s main emphasis would be on the wholesale side.
[Darin Sennett, the director of Web development at Powell’s,] acknowledged that Google would also be a competitor, since it would also sell books from its Web site. But he seemed to believe that Google would favor its smaller partners.
“I don’t see Google directly working to undermine or outsell their retail partners,” he said. “I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.”
The article reiterates Google’s promise not to tie books to any specific device or platform. I wonder how that is going to work, given that DRM by its very nature only works on devices that support it, and most publishers seem adamant that their books must be DRM’d.
I also have to wonder just how many independent bookstores are going to be interested in selling e-books. Powell’s is, naturally; they were originally one of the biggest supporters of the failed Rocketbook reader. But are smaller stores? Of course, given that Google will be providing basically a turnkey solution, it would probably not require all that much interest to do it.
“The article reiterates Google’s promise not to tie books to any specific device or platform. I wonder how that is going to work, given that DRM by its very nature only works on devices that support it”.
The new HTML5 standards make it possible for DRM to be cross-platform (see http://www.web-books.com/eLibrary/ON/B0/B50/12MB50.html ). To apply DRM, book contents must be stored in a user’s computer in such a way that only the propriatary ebook viewer can access it. For traditional ebook viewers, the local storage is platform-dependent.
The new HTML5 standards allow browsers to create local storage, or even a full-blown database. The database is now called IndexedDB. Any computer or device that has a browser with IndexedDB will be able to read DRMed ebooks based on the new HTML5 standards.
At present, none of the browsers has implemented IndexedDB yet. Then, what will Google’s Editions do? I think Google’s ebook viewer will include Google Gears, which can create a local database.
“I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.”
This sounds like wishful thinking. Google is the boggest ‘recommend’ machine on the planet. While readers will not get the personal attention and expertise that a small bookstore could give, we should not underestimate the power of linking someone’s search on any subject (not just book searches) to an automated offer to view a sample publication that might answer their query. It is a short hop from there to selling the searcher that (or another) book, even though they did not know they wanted it when they initially sent Google the keywords in question.
Oops… “boggest”
lol – What was I thinking?