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Could Google Editions kill of the traditional e-book? Books in the ‘clouds’
June 4, 2009 | 11:04 am
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By David Rothman
Despite the risk of Amazon dominating e-books, let’s not forget about Google—which prefers to sell you eternal access to books rather than the actual files.
You bet I’ll distrust Google’s approach if the buyable-file alternative isn’t available. But at least it would simplify technology, especially if combined with a Google Gears-style approach for offline reading, away from WiFi—a possibility that I and others have discussed here before.
Evan Schnittman, in his Black Plastic Glasses blog, reflecting his personal opinion, rather than that of Oxford University Press, his employer, has a pretty good explanation of the Cloud Concept as applied to books. I’d urge you to take a look. In essence you’d be paying for the right to view files in your browser or be able to read them at least temporarily offline.
The Amazon and libraries angles
Don’t think Amazon will just roll over dead. Already it will sell you access to movies, and of course you can buy online access to many titles as add-ons.
I’ll also be very curious what this could mean in terms of public libraries. I just hope they don’t get locked into the contained-book paradigm. We’re approaching the era of the networked book, which the cloud concept will facilitate, and it’s important that libraries not get left behind.
Related: Chris Meadows’ post mentioning the possibility of cloud-posted books being pirated.
Usual disclosure/reminder: I’m a very small Google shareholder, though you’d never guess it from the above. On the positive side, I think publishers should be willing to give Google a try—if for no other reason, other than to make an Amazon alternative viable.
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Comments:
I can see this working well with tech books (and text books) where the content needs to be updated frequently and old versions are pretty useless.
With regular non-fiction and fiction? I’m not so sure. I’m old-school paranoid, so I’d want at least a backup copy in my possession.
How can “networked books” and “casual piracy” be mentioned in the same article? This is so strange. If “casual piracy” is a crime — or for that matter even exists — how something like a “networked book” ever exist? Collaboration cannot be exclusive, and copyright certainly does not support it.
Using “piracy” to talk about non-commercial sharing is always dangerous at best. It leaves the door open for the “intellectual property” nazis to come rushing in and claim their virtual territories. If anyone is to profit, the author should be first, but if no one is to profit, so be it. We will all keep speaking and typing anyway.
We should all refuse to use the word “piracy” for non-commercial sharing. It is just not the same thing.
Buying books that are permanently in the “cloud” is just a bad idea. There is difference between buying a product and buying access. If you never get to keep that book in your possession (off-line cache access does not count since it is extremely limiting in your access to the book) then you are only buying access, which is more like renting. It should then come at a much more discounted price than buying the actual file for an e-book. A file downloaded onto your own personal hard drive means the memory that makes up that book is your property. You don’t get that with what Google seems to be proposing here. It would only be worthwhile if a usable file without DRM could be extracted from the cache (perhaps something hackers may figure out).
Books in the cloud is a great idea. Look at Steam, and the way they sell access to video games instead of a disc. I’d much rather buy access to Horatio Hornblower and know that I’ve got access to it for the rest of my life. I can read it on my phone, on my PC, on any other technology that comes along, rather than have a book that may get ruined by water, lost, borrowed to somebody else and never returned. If the model is done right, I feel it will be superior.
@ Marion: ‘access to it for the rest of my life’ — or until Google decides they aren’t making enough money off this venture and pull the plug. As they did with their video venture once upon a time.
Or, until somebody in the government decides that Hornblower is no longer acceptable, and all digital texts online are purged.
I’ve been expecting this sort of pay-library to come from the publishers. Movie and music companies want to get money from us every time we watch or listen. This is their ultimate goal. Publishers are, many of them, owned by the same parent companies, so they are being steered the same way.
This sort of thing actually strikes directly at Amazon’s hopes for textbooks, I would think. Schools would buy access to the textbooks, and students would be charged fees for the books in courses they register for.
I don’t see how they can protect the text, though. If I can log on to see the Google books, then I can take a screen shot of the image, assemble a jpeg-book version of all the pages, or run them through OCR. This is the same problem with paper books of course. There’s no real defeating this sort of thing; in the long run you can’t beat the Fahrenheit 451 scenario where people commit the texts to memory!