TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

By David Rothman

Plastic Logic prototype

So what do you think, gang? Now that Google is about to showcase its name on Android phones, might Google-branded e-book readers pop up someday?

Right now Google is promoting a multiuse approach, with its backing of the Android platform for mobile phones. An adaptation of FBReader will work on the Android platform, and Stanza and others will most likely follow—a great safeguard, by the way, against Apple bullying developers.

But if the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle and the promising new Plastic Logic-based machine take off, who’s to say Google will ignore the dedicated reader hardware market? Ideally, however, it can do it in an open way and encourage independent developers to optimize their apps for the branded hardware, which a number of vendors actually could provide within specs.

Reminder/disclosure: I own a tiny speck of Google as a retirement investment.

By David Rothman

Google, which just turned 10, has put up a news archive with old stories from major papers—an expansion of earlier efforts.

The archives go back as far as 200 years. Google is digitizing stories from newspapers just as it did for libraries. Trade-offs for the press? Perhaps. I like the idea of so many goodies going online, and it’s far, far better than another copyright battle—Google is getting permission. But will it mean less independence for newspapers, both individually and as an industry? Remains to be seen.

Privacy boost for Google users

In unequivocally good news, Google says it will retain IP-address-linked info for nine rather than 18 months; see related blog post and Techmeme roundup. Funny. Just yesterday I was hearing a radio interview during which Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that privacy was an area where search engines could compete—in areas such as retention length. Let’s just hope that the snoops in D.C. won’t thwart the trend early on.

The privacy paradox: Yes, the easier it is for old news stories to be accessed, the less privacy for Planet Earth at large. But at least we’re talking about citizen-to-citizen openness rather than simply the usual Big Bro-ish variety. Too bad that not everything in the archive is free.

Also of interest: Talk of an anti-trust suit against Google. Ouch. For retirement investment purposes, I’m a very small Google shareholder. But if the facts justify action against Google, then so be it. I myself have warned of the risk of letting one large corporation—be it Google, Amazon or anyone else—exercise too much control over content.

Google’s NBC partnership: New York Times and Techmeme roundup.

Image: CC-licensed photo from Paraflyer.

By Chris Meadows

In my post about the Espresso book machine, I mentioned a non-profit organization called Public Domain Reprints and promised to review the book I had ordered as soon as it arrived.

As it happens, I actually have not read The Crystal Stopper in quite a while, so the review will not focus on the story within it (though it is worth mentioning that it is an excellent and suspenseful tale of high adventure with French literature’s best-known master thief). What interests me is the construction and presentation of the book itself.

Finding the Book

The ordering process starts by going to Public Domain Reprints’s website and searching on the book or author you want to reprint. The search process is a bit…problematic. It’s an embedded search, powered by Google, and searches both the Internet Archive and Google Books to find the result.

Each result is presented with a bold blue link to the work itself, and a "Request a Reprint" link below it. At the bottom is a list of pages of results, as well as a "More Results" link.

The problem is, the search doesn’t work very well. First of all, it is fairly inaccurate. I typed in "Maurice Leblanc" both with and without quotation marks and found a whole lot of books unrelated to what I was looking for.

Second, the links are confusing. If I click on the big bold blue link for the book I want, I expect to be taken to a page where I can order it. Instead, I get the book itself on Google Books (or presumably the Internet Archive, though I did not find any results there). I would have to click the smaller, unassuming "Request a Reprint" link below the result to get to the order page. This might be too confusing for unwary users.

Still on the subject of links, the results page numbers at bottom take you to more pages of results in the embedded search—but the "More results" link takes you away from publicdomainreprints.org entirely, to the Google Books search homepage. And while you can certainly find the book you want there, you cannot order a reprint of it from there.

I ended up having to go to the Google Books native search page, do an Advanced Search, and copy the query syntax it generated ("inauthor:Maurice inauthor:Leblanc date:0-1923"), then take that back to the publicdomainreprints.org page to get what I wanted: a list of books by Maurice Leblanc that were out of copyright.

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By David Rothman

Google has posted a download link and other information for the Chrome browser, discussed earlier today from an e-book angle. I installed it without hassles, and, like Mike Cane, am happy so far.

The big issue is whether it’ll be less of a memory hog than Firefox.

I’m also curious if Chrome wil work with Firefox plug-ins, such as those to display searches at specific sites.

Firefox bookmarks and other settings imported instantly.

So where does this leave Google’s relations with the Mozilla Foundation? Less money for the foundation from Google in the future?

By David Rothman

Come on, Google. You can do it—the ePub e-book standard, I mean.

Google has just launched a new browser, which could, as seen by the Wall Street Journal, be an operating system in disguise. That suggests lots of potential beyond mere Web browsing. E-books and ePub, anyone?

We already know about Opera being able to read ePub experimentally via a widget. Might Google have similar plans for the Chrome browser, now in beta and downloadable later today for free in a Windows incarnation?

Looking farther, ahead, the Google browser might fit in well with ambitions in networked book area.

Remember, via caching systems similar to the one used in Gears, people in time would be able to enjoy even some networked books off line—or at least the more common links. Just depends on how quickly hardware and bandwidth improve. At any rate you can’t think of possible scenarios for Chrome without also remembering the existence of services such as Google Book Search.

The big selling points: Speed and stability—even multithreading capabilities. Oh, how the suspense mounts. With better user control, will the browser be less of a memory hog than Firefox, which, alas, in its very latest incarnation, still acts up on me?

A question at jkOnTheRun: How well will the new browers run on notebooks. Here at the TeleBlog, we’ll pop another question. What about incarnations for cellphones and other handhelds? And how might Chrome fit in with the Google-backed Android OS? Obviously Microsoft, which wants to use Internet Explorer 8 to steer people to its search engines, has stirred Google’s competitive instincts. See image to the left.

The Amazon angle: What if Google can learn to do interactivity at the same level that Amazon does? The multi-threaded brower could open up a number of possibilities in the e-book area and elsewhere. The big issue is, whether Google can.

Related: Info on the comic book promoting Chrome, plus our earlier item, ePub widget for Opera: Browsers to do e-books in a big way?

And a reminder: As a retirement investment, I own a tiny speck of Google, which, as TeleBlog regulars know, I don’t hesitate to bash when it deserves it.

By David Rothman

Google is planning Android Market, and apparently it will be more open than the iPhone App store. Which approach do you think will be better? Will Apple apps be more reliable and less virus-prone because the company is controlling them more tightly? Is the loss of developer freedom worth it? With less bureaucracy involved with Android Market, could users come out ahead with, say, more frequent updates of e-reading apps? And much less risk in the future that Google will try to inflict a pet app and format on the masses?

Interesting issue: Will Google treat some books as apps, the way Apple is doing? Some interesting opps for publishers? Or would a straight bookstore be better? Or maybe a mix?

Related: HTC’s Android-driven Dream revealed in glorious spy photos, in Engadget—plus related Techmeme roundup.

By David Rothman

One gimmick is that the new IE 8 will come with search arrangements with a number of content-related partners. Interesting. But wouldn’t it be a lot more fun if Microsoft turned IE into an e-book standards-compliant reader when you wanted it to be? Ain’t gonna happen, but a TeleBlogger can dream.

An intriguing feature: "Search suggestions." And now a few more details from Forbes:

The new browser comes with a search box in the upper right-hand corner and, just below that, a row of tiny logos for various search destinations, such as Yahoo, Ebay and MySpace. You can select which destinations you want to include here.

If your search will likely end up in Wikipedia, for instance, with a single click over a little "W" you can search only that encyclopedia. Amazon.com displays items for sale. The New York Times shows snippets of stories. So far 27 Web sites have joined the drop-down column, including Facebook and Digg.

Microsoft is, uncharacteristically, keeping its hands off, giving Web sites the option to serve up results and customize how they appear. It also magnanimously lets those sites take all the revenue from ads alongside the results. That’s a sly stab at Google’s business, though this kind of searching–where users already know where they want to go–doesn’t yield especially lucrative ads for Google…

Related: Techmeme roundup and IE beta download page.

By David Rothman

Links of the moment:

—The Gphone may really happen, and Ammunition Group may be designing it, from Tech Crunch. Another gizmo to display e-books? Remember, FBReader is to run in Android, the Google-blessed OS for cellphones. As with the iPhone, however, we could see many more e-book apps—ideally with the ePub standard among the formats. (Thanks to Mike Cane.)

—On a small screen, just the salient stuff, in the NYT. This is a must-read for writers and publishers. It’s okay to write long on the Web, as I see it, but you’d better get to the point in the headline and use subheads in long posts. For novelists, dialogue may be good, in terms of white space to break up the gray. To answer the inevitable question, the iPhone’s screen is 3.5 inches, though the phone lets you zoom in on, say, individual newspaper columns. My Palm TX’s screen is 3.75 inches. Still, the iPhone and the iPod Touch—I’m buying a used Touch—seems to be where the apps are at.

—Rereading classic science fiction, from Aharon Robbins, a blogger at Intel. "We don’t often realize it when we read current SF works how much they reflect the times in which they are written. I also suppose that when we’re younger (I did a lot of reading in my 20s) we’re not attuned to such larger things either."

By David Rothman

Details here. Related: "How Google used librarians…and got away with it."

By David Rothman

The Christian Science Monitor’s headline about Google says it all: "The field narrows for e-books. As Microsoft backs away from digitization, some worry that a single company could privatize world knowledge." Granted, there’s Amazon. But its library of the classics is tiny compared to Google’s, and it’s charging the public for e-book versions.

"If we assume that a healthy, diverse, and accessible body of information is essential to science, politics, creativity, literature, then we really have to step back and say, ‘Do we really want to put this one company in the position of being the filter for the world’s information?’" So worries Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media specialist and cultural historian at the University of Virginia.  "I wouldn’t say Google is 100 percent of the digital book world," he says, "but it’s getting near 90 percent." See The Googlization of Everything, the site for his book in progress.

The financial angle: The same article quotes Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive as saying that the Microsoft retreat shows the risk of depending on a for-profit company to pay for digitization. Exactly. We need a mix of approaches—philanthropic, for-profit and tax-funded.

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By David Rothman

Just as I’m calling for Google to devote more tech resources to improve the OCRing of Victorian novels, along comes news that the company has started up a 3D VR project on the Web—called Lively.

Everyone has his/her own priorities, right? Just remember, Google’s focuses aren’t necessarily those of many librarians. Of course some might recognize important uses of VR, including the popularization of literature. That said, old-fashioned text counts, and I’m still frustrated that Google so far hasn’t done ePub, which would be good for both it and the planet at large.

Fleet-fingered Wikipedians, meanwhile, have already tapped out the details of Google’s latest move. Also see Google News roundup. Watch out, Second Life!

By David Rothman

Given all the greats, from Austen to Dickens, the 19th century may have been the time for the novel. But zillions of words from then still need to be scanned, and beyond the withdrawal of Microsoft from the public domain scene, other challenges abound. Here’s one.

"OCR technology for 19th and early 20th century type fonts is not advancing," a Smithsonian staffer wrote during a discussion on the Open Library list.

True? If so, what about the massive Google digitization project?

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