IBPA Publishing University: The World According to Google: What Publishers Need to Know Today

Michael Healy, Book Rights Registry; Roland Lange, Google; Angela D’Agostino, Bowker:

Roland Lange: Google Books has two different programs: partners and library. He discusses partner program. Over 2 million books from 30,000 publishers. All in the program by agreement with publishers. Program is free. Put in search request and will come up with results, including books. If click through, can see 20% of book, multiple buy links, related books and publisher branding. Nobody pays for this. Content is territorially restricted by publishers, can’t copy, download or print it. Publishers get exposure on Google and get reporting on each and every book in the program. 90% of all publisher book seen every week by somebody. Search Inside the Book is no charge to the retailer. Content is hosted by Google. 150 retailers around the world use Search Inside. For publishers and enhanced version is available with no ads and at no charge. Google Edition: ebook market fragmented. Google will combine all clouds. All books stored in the cloud and can be read on any device. Acts in two ways, sales from Google and sales from other retailers powered by Google. No retail deals with retailers done yet. Will pay on Google or directly through retailer. Set a username and password for stuff that will be in the cloud. Full color, bookmarking, margin notes, printing, copy and paste, seamless reading on devices. Stand alone app for all the devices plus have a browser based display for that will run on the devices. Can be through any browser. Google will take the publisher’s terms of sale and make money as a retailer or whatever they sell as a Google Edition. Google will cache the entire library into the browser memory so can read books online and off line. Requires HTML5 browser and there is a lot of memory for this with compression technology. Bundling option for retailers.

Angela D’Agostino: ISBN agency wants a different ISBN for every different file format for the ebook. Getting a lot of push back from publishers. Bowker changed their pricing model to accommodate this. Some publishers refuse outright to do this. Still have to deal with this. Some publishers using the same ISBN for hard cover and ebooks. NY Times can’t create a best seller list for ebooks, which it wants to do, because of the lack of specific ISBNs assigned to ebooks. Google has agreed to assign ISBNs if publishers don’t.

Michael Healy: no new information.