On the other hand, RandomHouse is spending their digital funding on “search inside” and have limited resources for other digital initiatives. This is an initiative that I would like to see fail.

You may not be familiar with Avon’s Fan Lit project. It was a contest whereby aspiring authors got to write chapters of a book that were voted upon by the readers. In the end, a 6 chapter novella was completed. A free version of this was given away to readers but the problem was that you could only read it using a special viewer. The special viewer did not allow you to use page up/page down keys to navigate and it was not downloadable. Further, I believe that it was only available online.

This type of format is not only frustrating to work (not use the pg up/dn keys?), but it is also very constraining for the reader. I ended up buying the novella in my preferred format at Fictionwise.

This micropayment (ie, the pay per page or the pay per tune idea) is a way for businesses to maximize profits much like publishers do with the issuance of hardcovers, trades followed by the cheaper mass market. I don’t want to have to pay MORE of a premium for e content than I already do and this is what it is looking like is going to happen.

We are like frogs in the cooking pot. As the heat slowly turns up, we don’t realize we are cooked until it is too late. If you are buying a page at 4 or 5 cents, you think to yourself this is cheap. But when you eventually decide to buy that book and receive credit for what you have already spent, you will have paid twice as much if not more for the online version that is locked down and controlled by the publisher as you will if you had bought the paper version.

Over time, it probably makes more financial sense to buy a scanner and the paper books and simply make your own ecopies.

Another reason I do not get entirely worked up over this is that almost every type of search apart from regular web search that Google attempted was badly exuceted. Google News is a shadow of what it could be, Google Images is hardly the best way to find images and so on. The more gaps Google keeps creating in the search experience, the more likely it is someone will come along and do it better than them.

I guess the spooky most referred to Google’s presumed eagerness to abandon its motto of Don’t Be Evil.

According to the Washington Post article, Google intends to digitize all books and, I would assume, make them available for sale. Random House wants to do it for their content and is offering up its technology for other publishers to use to offer content digitally.

Perhaps for some academic books this may be worthwhile, but I would rather use interlibrary loan or something than to pay 5 cents per page. It seems cheap, but it adds up quickly.

Readers want to own the books that they pay for and they want to control when, where, and how those books are read.

You’d think Google would get that. They pretty much control most things on the internet these days, but this move would be a big mistake.

Talk about pissing on their chips.

There really is such a thing as being too big.

Google’s version was originally designed to catalog, digitize, then redistribute online various academic library collections of out of copyright, public domain books. Then the dollar signs popped in, the money angle hit and it became – scan everything and charge for it. The libraries who originally signed up and helped Google with their book scheme couldn’t afford to have their slowly crumbling rare book collections digitized to save them from decay.

If they had stuck with the original plan, I’d be saying more power to them because then I could have access to rare books that I can find locally, can’t afford to buy as they are expensive as all hell, nor can I get access to by visiting as you have to be a member of the community to get access to it – usually a professor, graduate student or alumni researcher.

Now, I’m thinking, screw this… you’re just in it for profit, stop lying about how it’s to get more books to the reading public.

~Avaron

I can’t see why anyone would want to pay that much for a book that’s available relatively cheaply in paperback, though.

I wonder if this is one of those cases where a business does something wacky to get something into court so they can win a concession either through litigation or settlemt that they couldn’t negotiate that enables them to bring forward (another!) something they’ve got simmering on the back burner.

Or, it could just be a wacky idea. *G*