After Microsoft’s May withdrawal from the Open Content Alliance it became uncertain what the future of digitised text would be and the main focus of concern moved to Google’s digitizing venture. It seems that many now feel some optimism after Google’s surprise settlement with the American publishing industry. At least if you judge things by the er… cover.
Following the money, the appeal is that everybody gets paid but more importantly book lovers will now be able to access out of print books. However, some questions do remain. Google have been, and will continue to, scan entire books and to display 20% of them at their whim. And this is where some concerns surface. If you’ve read 20% of a book digitally you’re probably going to want to read the rest of it… and probably be willing to do that digitally too. Once Google are the leading provider of digitised books, and also of the online search of those books it becomes very hard to envisage how anyone will be able to compete… leaving them to monopolise the provision of digital books.
Whatever one’s feelings about these developments the prospects for digital readers now looks a lot more interesting, although perhaps not for our namesake the Amazon Kindle. Amazon’s 190,000 titles appear pretty insignificant next to the millions that Google will have. How long before Google starts to compete in that territory too or has it already entered via Android?
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