Life As It Goes By

It is about time to talk about digital press.

Google Books, a feature on Google website, is nothing new to everyone by now. Google has now digitized 10,000,000 books (according to Official Google Blog) since 2004. This is about 10 times the estimated number of English words (Merriam-Webster). However, Google Books is not the only source for digitized press. There are Internet Archive, Europeana, Gallica and HathiTrust. Also, the Project Gutenberg is really the pioneer of digital library. Forget about buying classics such as Alice in Wonderland and works from Charles Dickens. You can get it free from PG. Don’t worry about copyright issues if you are in the States. My only complaint is the number of supported formats (from text to audio files) is large but not consistent (you may not find the format you want).

To me, this is a fantastic idea though not the most original one. To digitize all the books (currently only in English) around the world and put together in a space-saving server, it just too productive. Yes, that is the correct economics term to use. Productivity level is high for this that I can’t even determine a reasonable value for it. Imagine all the books’ contents that can be stored and made available to all everywhere around the globe. You don’t have to queue or fight for the book you badly need for your assignment. You don’t have to buy the book which you only need a few pages of. The best part is you can search faster than your physical eyes for the words that you are looking for. If you learn better by listening, then you can simply use some reading software to aid your learning. Audio books are another alternative.

Well, this is just me. There are many others who are against the novel idea behind this movement by Google. Surprisingly, Microsoft and Yahoo (or just Microsoft) happens to be among them, the Open Book Alliance (representing… er… people of Open Book?). Amazon has the loudest voice and at some level of justification, it does have some rights to express its views. However, the alliance represents only such a percentage of the whole publishing industry. Where did they find the courage to put up such a fight. It costs peanuts to them to set up the same equipment as Google and starts creating their own digital library (Microsoft did try before but apparently, they feel seeking the other path is easier).

Main players in the publishing industry, on the other hand, looked calmer than expected. They seemed to be concerned much about having their copyrights paid for. One can’t deny that the potential market for electronic books is huge. It’s unbelievable when you work out the costs and profits of running a completely digital publishing. It’s just basically you, formally the publisher, and the authors running the whole show. You just have to do away with your printing operations and logistics, which are the greatest costs of your business. Enough said.

If this day is to come, purchasing of e-book should be as easy as a mouse click. The moment you click and read the book, you have to pay. As your mileage (i.e. the amount of data downloaded) increases, the savings for payment increase. When you finish the book, you will be given a one-time offer to download the book for keep and your name will be printed on every page of the e-book to avoid the book from falling into the hands of others. You can transfer the ownership by simply giving a small administrative charge for it.

Mr. Darwin have long reminded us the existence of evolution in our world. It is just a matter of time. Take the example of MP3. Many years ago, the downloading of MP3 songs were widespread and almost uncontrollable. The music industry suffered greatly from the loss of revenue. Lawsuits began to take place, targeting at software providers who facilitated such downloads. While these were happening, the price of audio Compact Discs (CDs) fell and fell. The same CDs can store 100 over songs in the MP3 format, compared to around 10 to 16 songs in the WAV format. It really made little sense to pay so much for something less. However, MP3 is not totally free. There is a license fee charged to all players of such format. Hence, makers of audio devices created their own audio formats to avoid such charges. Then, a brilliantly timed move by Apple Computer, a webstore is established for the sale of songs in AAC format. These songs can be downloaded to iPods for playing. Each song was charged at 99cents and artists were paid for their rights to their hard work. And the rest became the history of digital audio industry.

Google has been paying for the rights of the digital books they have converted. More policies would be enforced on usage of these information. They may not reap the rewards for all these deeds. There are more than 1 online stores selling e-books and audiobooks. Like in the example above, all it takes is a well-thought business model that keeps everyone happy and realistic of what is feasible. It is about time that Google re-think who they should be paying and whether selling digital books is going to be a business venture for them.