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By Paul Biba

future.jpgGoogle Books engineering director Dan Clancy was interviewed recently and he talked about Google’s vision of the future. He said that that the settlement was looking at the past, but in the future Google had other ideas. Here’s an excerpt from the interview as published by the BayNewser:

… But right now the physical bookstores are a critical part of our book ecosystem. And in fact a huge amount of books are bought because people go into a physical bookstore and say, hey I want this, I want that. And I think it’s a mistake if we think of our future digital world as digital means online and physical means offline. Because if that happens and 10 percent of the world goes digital, that’s going to be really hard for all the bookstores to sustain their business model.

So part of our model is to figure out we’re going to syndicate for our partner program all of the books we sell that are new, so that any bookstore can sell a Google edition and find a way that people can buy them in bricks and mortar stores as well.

And then finally, our model is you should be able to read on any device…. Our model is some people will read [our books] on a laptop, some will read them on the phone, some people will read on their netbook, and some people will read on their e-reader. And we’ll work with any reader provider that wants to make it so they can get their books from the Google cloud….

So the principles of our future world is trying to build this world where there’s lots of retail players, read on any device, but it’s still stored in the cloud. And as we talk with publishers and booksellers, I think this is the right model, because we’re trying to make what would be an open model that encourages competition. …

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

 
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