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When good books go digital

by Angela Hey

Do you prefer reading books on paper or on a screen? I enjoy trading books at BookBuyers on Castro Street, but Google could shake up the used book business with Google Books, the company's initiative to provide online access to all books.

Two weeks ago at the Computer History Museum, museum CEO John Hollar sat down with Dr. Daniel Clancy, engineering director of Google Books (books.google.com), to discuss the future of digital content. (Disclosure: my husband John Mashey is a trustee of the Computer History Museum.) Stanford Prof. Ed Feigenbaum, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, introduced the speakers. He said that when Google first announced the project, some responded with fear and some, like him, responded with awe.

In 2004, Google started scanning books in research libraries. By 2005, the Authors Guild, authors and major publishers sued Google for copyright violation. The suit was settled in 2008, pending a final hearing on Oct. 7 of this year. Details of the settlement and comments are available at www.thepublicindex.org.

Google has now scanned 10 million books, and estimates there are about four times as many in the United States. Publishers and authors can add their books to Google's collection and receive compensation. Copyright holders can choose how much of a book's content is revealed to searchers. Currently, partners have submitted 1.5 million in-print books, nearly five times the 320,000 titles that Amazon offers for its Kindle e-book reader.

Google lets you download the entire book if the book is out-of-copyright. A 2008 analysis showed readers viewed 10 or more pages in over half of the public domain books in Google's online library, which now numbers 1.5 million volumes.

When the agreement is finalized, Google will spend $34.5 million to set up a Book Rights Register to track copyright owners. Google will offer out-of-print books that are still in copyright for viewing online or download. The copyright holder gets 63 percent of the revenue and the rest goes to Google.

In 1998, Mountain View-based NuvoMedia (acquired by Gemstar) launched the Rocket, an early e-book reader. The product failed, in part because the books it read used a proprietary format. Before Microsoft Windows, software had to know details of the computer screen. Before Adobe PostScript, documents tended to lack decorative fonts and graphics. Windows and PostScript supported many hardware environments, fueling new industries.

Google will let any book be read on multiple devices — including the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader and Samsung's new product, just launched in Korea. From the UK, Plastic Logic, which has operations in Mountain View, expects to offer a thin e-book reader in 2010. You will be able to read e-books on smart phones, netbooks and laptops.

Similarly, the Google Books initiative will change how books are used. Entrepreneurs will re-compile parts of old books, like record companies making new releases of old music. Genealogists will have more resources for ancestry research. Historians will find more original materials.

Google still has plenty of obstacles: The Justice Department is investigating the settlement, the American Libraries Association is worried about subscription fees, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is concerned about privacy and the Internet Archive worries that Google will prevent others from getting access to books.

But Google Books is already changing study habits. It will give old books new lives, give authors new revenue sources and give entrepreneurs new business ideas. And consider this: Half of student interns recently interviewed at Google had not visited a library during the last year.

Angela Hey can be reached at amhey@techviser.com.