Man Is The Media.
How Google Book Search Turns Publications Into “Marketing” And Why We Should (Moderately) Love Them for It
December 11th, 2008 by Martin
Tags: google book search, online library
Google Book Search, the not-so-catchy name for probably the biggest undertaking in history towards the complete digitalization of print-based knowledge, just announced that they’ll now be hosting magazine content in addition to books.
An example. Popular Mechanics is a magazine that’s been published for a century. Think of all that knowledge, locked in that impractical printed format. You’ll need a physical copy, which is hard to come by, and you’ll actually have to browse it with your hands and eyes to obtain knowledge from it. It’s a dirty and time-consuming process, that only bibliophiles can appreciate. Right?
Not anymore. Following the announcement you can now go to the archive of Popular Mechanics on Google Book Search. Every issue from 1905 till 2005 is now available in visual and digitized format. What this means is that someone with a helluva lot time on their hands (Google) have scanned the old printed copies and extracted text from that (a process called OCR). Effectively it makes the words searchable and indexable by Google.
This is where it gets mind-bogglingly interesting. All those pages and their knowledge are now readily available at the tip of your fingers, effectively from any device with web access. It’s an amazing source of historical knowledge, and, just as important, it’s displayed visually exactly as it was back then, which tells us just as much about an era as the text-based knowledge alone.
What does Google get out it?
Google wants to organize all the information in the world, they say. Essentially it means putting it online on their servers, display it the way they want to and finance everything with their ads so common people like you and me can access it freely. The inclusion of books, and now magazines, is just another step in this direction and as a forward moving and enlightened society we should be happy. For the most part.
For instance, yesterday I scanned the ISBN barcode on the back of an old Oscar Wilde anthology with my Android phone G1, and it instantly takes me to Google Book search, where I can search the full text of the thousand page book directly through my smart phone. I guess I don’t have to tell you about the benefits for students and scholars alike. The uses of digital public domain information is only on the verge of being discovered, as we move on collectively, refining the way human and knowledge interacts.
What we could be worried about, is gathering all that knowledge in the hands of one institution that in no way is unaffected by financial and selfish considerations. Whoever controls the flow of information, holds the power. While Google notoriously claims to do no evil, I think the realistic conclusion is that they probably are the lesser of evils currently available. In a world of online media and constantly broadcasting citizens, doing evil wouldn’t go unnoticed, and Google knows that.
Companies loves online advertising for the user metrics and convenience, and Google Adwords have made a science of providing just that. As adoption grows rapidly, Google needs even more real estate to keep pricing low. Anyone having created an Adwords campaign recently, quickly spots ridiculously high prices for the popular keywords (try ‘magazine’ on for size). A few years back, it wasn’t like that, and I’m pretty sure Book Search is part of the same strategy that leads Google to buy up social networks too.
Should we mind that Google makes money? There’s definitely strong forces against Google, even bordering on paranoia. Recently I discovered the EU-funded Europeana, a European counterpart to Book Search, trying to organize important knowledge in European culture (background). As they launched last month, their servers crashed, allegedly getting 10 millions hits in an hour. Would that have happened with Google infrastructure?
What do the publishers get out of it?
Google promises protection, sales and visibility to publishers who share their content on Book Search. Publications are used as ‘marketing’ material, driving online sales or interested readers to the publishing company’s webpage. Going back to the example of Popular Mechanics, here’s what you see in the sidebar:
Since the 1970 issue isn’t on sale anymore, Hearst is getting some link-love when people click the red logo (takes them here). I don’t know if they get a cut of the ad revenue generated by the sponsored links above, but I think it would only be fair, as the full issue is made available.
I find all this extremely interesting. From a gloomy perspective, you could say that by making full publications available to drive traffic to your services, you turn good and clean information into marketing material. I’d say that advertising is already a fact of life and only by improving the quality, significance and relevance of the marketed message can you transform advertising into useful information. And that is what I see Google doing with the context-sensitive Adwords, and now books and magazines on Book Search.
Book Search has been years in the making already. Just i
magine the hours of sheer copyright negotiations that has been spent with the 20,000 publishers now on board. It hasn’t been easy, and the project was on trial, which was just settled. I for one would like to see the publishing industry play a much more proactive role in all of this. Everyone knows they own the content, which it’s all about, but seen from the outside it’s as if the industry doesn’t really get the big picture. Instead you see the industry go crazy when one company launches an iPhone app.
What remains to be seen is if Google can pull this off fast enough before someone else does (like it happened with Google Video that actually launched before YouTube) and if Google can make Book Search attractive enough for people outside the research/historical field (it could go down just as Google Catalogs that conceptually holds potential but seems reluctant to launch for real). These are indeed interesting times.
[...] database and portal for European culture is back online. I mentioned them a while ago as an EU alternative to mainly US-based information aggregation services (such as [...]