Pondering Google EBooks: Ex Nebulae Libri

For years I’ve wanted to do ebooks served efficiently from the cloud and I'm glad Google is finally implementing it with bravado, but I think publishers need to be aware that Google’s plans could have some serious implications for their content in the long run. How will customers use it? What will publishers have to do to compete in a space where Google is both the most popular search engine and a retailer? Do the other retailers who rely on searches or who pay for ad space with Google see it as a conflict of interest? And how do we as a publisher use this effectively to distinguish our needles in the haystack?

Recently, publishing guru Mike Shatzkin began talking about his project to chart the constantly developing ebook space as it relates to all the current devices, including the necessary software, supported formats, and retailers. Google is joining this grid in a big way. I’ll be very interested to see how he lines up all these new and old platforms, particularly if he starts to rank them in terms of profitability based on royalty rates and returns. But Shatzkin has also been making some excellent points that relate to how publishers see this space, namely that the continuing format and device wars make the role of publishers just as important as ever. “The more complicated this world becomes,” he says, “the more an author will need a professional organization.” I understand this because every day at E-Reads we channel our expertise to tailor authors’ content to fit what formats customers are asking for, and they continue to ask for plenty of options.

Google’s ebook sales channel will be the latest flavor. As Google prepares to enter the market, I’ve been wondering if there’s going to be any negative impact on other format sales or if there's going to be trouble with Cloud City. It’s hard to say until we've seen what Google finally brings out. Google will be doing a multifaceted delivery to many devices and future APIs. And the Google ebook platform doesn’t just allow publishers to monetize, it’s even open to author-bloggers. It’s the overdue advent of a paid premium text content system. As competition to services like Scribd, it's going to be easier than ever for the average person or company to set a price on written content they might have given away in the past, and to compete with traditional publishers.

As Shatzkin and the New York Times have pointed out, Google isn’t really aiming to sell files as much as they will be selling online access to ebooks and texts they’ve inventoried for their popular search engine. In that way, if your device can access Google on the net (iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) you’ll be able to read premium content from your Google book shelf. Future web-applications might even be able to filter and reuse the Google-served content (with permission, of course), and deliver texts in ways we can't even imagine today.

Publishers will do very well in adopting Google as a sales partner for their content, providing they accept that this is a pivotal development that requires them to pay much more attention to marketing etext (both books and snippets, content integrated into different hashes) in the future. This is a natural evolution that coincides with the rise of social data increasingly being served from the cloud and the pressure Google faces to create a semantic Web 3.0 experience that can analyze data more effectively, particularly in valuable resources like books, and serve it up in new ways. And those new ways are going to make the retail space for etexts much more interesting in the coming years.

So what’s to worry about?

For the last few years, Google's business practice has been to take advantage of digitized books to extend the web's reference material, and thus add value to their searches and databases (not without some hiccups). Publishers were happy to see that it was driving sales for print and ebooks at retailers like Amazon. It was a means to an end at another location. But when Google starts merchandizing their data cache of library books and publisher content, publishers will have to work harder to make their content stand out at Google's site, especially older books, to make their upkeep worthwhile financially, seeing as it might be the only stop customers need anymore.

I’m sure Amazon is worried on our behalf. Despite appealing to publishers with a low discount rate, Google sees themselves as retailer agnostic, a mere stepping stone to helping customers get to the content they want, and so in some ways they’ve hobbled Google Books from being too competitive against the other players. You see, like Scribd, for the time being it’s not the best-looking presentation of material that publishers can ask for when you compare it to some of the better formats. I don’t think Google wants to dry up all the other format sales initially. But they may be devaluing the content anyway, unintentionally.

Books Still Need Packaging

Google wants to aggregate literature, which is traditionally stand-alone content, into fast-served web content and that can devalue the market value of authors' full length literary work. If you just want the words, why pay for bells and whistles? A library doesn't need curb appeal, right?

Customers are increasingly attracted to biting off smaller chunks of written content if the opportunity is presented to them. That's not to say that truncated and abridged versions are what people prefer to read, but I think eventually serving books from the cloud will allow Google to break up book content for micro sales, which is what publisher ebook services like LibreDigital have been anticipating. What if you only need the third chapter of a Malcolm Gladwell book? As it already stands, Google makes it easy to filter the content you need from the chaff, and now they'll sell it to you.

The cloud methodology of serving and selling books will further blur the lines about what a “book” really is. Is it just a lump sum of accessed words? Where’s the sense of unified aesthetic package? Long stories, novels and reference books without packaging don't compete for attention and pageviews well against attractive blogs, wikis, or streamed video, but book fragments and book widgets will be increasingly competitive. Google Books’ search tools already fragment the larger texts so that customers can quickly access relevant material. Google sees the web as a big haystack for which they map the way to your specific needle. It used to be that most publishers thought they were selling more than just another needle for the haystack.

I wonder how self-aware Google is that they are working at effacing the relevance of a "book" by supplanting it with data nodes on the Internet. Is Google Reader an adequate way to present long-form material and give it the luster it deserves? Publishers need to decide if they are sacrificing too much of the quality in a reading experience just to fit this new format. It's something I already worry about with ebooks on successful platforms like the Kindle and Sony.

You’re Now Shopping, Not Searching

It used to be that shopping was not analogous to web searching, but the future wants it to be. Does Google expect small publishers to start treating ebook content as if it deserves Google marketing ad words? This is money that large publishers know how to spend for traditional marketing, but it's more nebulous when it means spending money to distinguish older, backlist content. It doesn't look worthwhile at this point, but to protect the relevance of the material (even novels) at Google, publishers will have to adopt new strategies, including even more efforts at advertiser sponsorship. Widgets and viral campaigns aren't enough. Pushing content into Google and various ebook formats can't remain a relatively passive activity for too much longer: ebooks will need more of their own marketing.

But even when Google directs potential customers to premium content successfully, most people will look for alternatives where they don't have to pay. That's the nature of the web. Pirate material and advertiser sponsored Freemiums. Today you can pay $1.99 for the TV episode on iTunes or watch it for free with Hulu. Hulu wins.

Maybe the time for integrating books into the Internet is overdue, but it's divesting old social structures of their roles in book sales. The internet has increasingly been jeopardizing the influence of print culture, shaping a new discourse of short and snappy bite size reading experiences. Or maybe this is the happy start to a better future. Either way, publishers have their work cut out for them. Luckily, there are two strong groups who are proactively supporting publishers. First, public libraries are adopting ebook technology and are contributing to the ebook landscape in their efforts to survive the paradigm shift. And the IDPF has been helping publishers to rally around an open standards future with the ePub format. The increasing pervasiveness of the ePub format at retail points will be important for customers once the competition among devices and sales channels really heats up. After PDF, with all its limitations, the ePub format is the best-looking and most future-proof format you can buy.

And even the iPhone is demonstrating that users still choose to have it both ways: old-school (long form ebooks) and new school (short-form cloud-served micro content). Thanks to strong support from graphically inclined developers, iPhone ebook apps allow publisher content to flourish a bit better as “books,” especially titles that can sell themselves as stand-alone applications (such as with Iceberg Reader). These ebook apps set themselves apart and overcome the bias against long form content with excellent graphic presentation, and appear "special" to the readers and customers, and all this distinguishes the content much better. And that’s what matters to a publisher. Its why many of us love what we do. We strive to distinguish good content as a relevant experience for readers.

Michael Gaudet