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Google Book Search is three years old now and, with the cancellation of Microsoft’s Live Search Book (with such an illiterate name it had to be doomed), it’s again the only free-online-full-text-searchable show in town.
Under its partner programme, whereby publishers upload their titles onto Google’s servers and stipulate how it can viewed online, Google now has over a million titles from 20,000 publishers in the programme.
Talking in Hall 8 with Chris Palma, Google’s strategic partner development manager, I learned that Google is now offering an additional tool of striking potential for both booksellers and publishers.
In a service not unlike Amazon’s ‘Search Inside the Book’, booksellers can now offer their online customers the ability to look inside books before they buy. As soon as a customer finds a particular book on a booksellers’ website, the full-text version of it is loaded from the Google Book Search database.
‘With a decent internet connection, it’s almost instantaneous,’ explained Palma.
The limits on how much of the book can be viewed are the same as those stipulated by the publisher for Google Book Search, starting from 20 per cent of the book.
Properly implemented, this new tool could give even the smallest online bookseller the opportunity to replicate the browsing that goes on in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. As most consumers are lucky to get more than a jacket image and a blurb from the average online bookseller (with the exception of Amazon), this represents a major advance.
Palma also told me that, generally speaking, Google’s statistics how that the more browsable book content you offer to the online consumer, the more chance there is of a sale. Of course, it may be self-defeating if you offer almost the whole book free. My fellow blogger Ed Nawotka tells me he recently had the chance to read 90 per cent of a book and then realised he had no need to purchase it.
What Google needs to develop now is a grumpy avatar to pop up after the consumer has read about half the book and say ‘This isn’t a library, mate - either buy it or close your browser!’
Palma has recently been to India to start the process of getting the Indian publishing industry on board. There are many wonderful things about the Indian book industry, but orderliness is not one of them. There is no Indian Books in Print, ISBN and barcodes are not universally used, and there is no reliable information on what is published and by whom.
It may be Google’s lasting legacy if it can organise the Indian book industry!
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