Unless I am missing something many of the headlines about Google and its ‘e-books coup’ are totally irrelevant. Google plots e-books coup: The Times in London ran that as a headline about Google’s Book Search project. This project is changing shape and metamorphosing as it goes along. It is now starting to talk about making single chapters or whole books available on a rental basis.

Jens Redmer, who heads Google Book Search in Europe, said, ‘You may just want to rent a travel guide for the holiday or by a chapter of a book. Ultimately, it will be the readers to decide how books are read.’

So this is nothing like ebooks where typically you download a whole book which is, as far as possible, the same as the original. What it is about is that using Google Book Search you can information in a book — probably non-fiction — and then purchase the relevant chapter without paying for the rest of the book.

Google accounts are already in place, Google Checkout is already up and running, and Google Book Search already has archived hundreds of thousands of books and can search and display them with ease. But there is an argument that suggests it will not happen. Certainly not the way that Google seems to think.

First point is that once it strays away from search engines Google tends not to get it right. It has usable programs on the Internet which people simply are not using. And it has a whole boat load of bits and pieces which have together added the square root of sod all to its turnover.

The second point, and the most important one, is that there is not yet an affordable reader for these books. Yes, people will download pieces on to their computer provided they are not in the dreaded Adobe .pdf format. But what will they use to read those pieces when they are away from their computer?

This is nothing like the Apple iPod situation. There Apple started with an elegant machine which played music to an acceptable standard and was easy to carry. Then Apple got the tunes together in iTunes so that they could be downloaded for a price. In this Apple has it exactly right.

Hardware first; downloadable content second.

Most of the stories in the press focus on publishers and their reaction to the Google concept. This matters very little. Publishers were ever willing to be flexible when it comes to making money. Despite what they tell you, publishing is not an occupation for gentlemen. Lord Byron was right when he said: ‘Now Barrabas was a publisher.’

This simply is not where the problem lies.

The problem is that a book, as it stands at the moment, is much more portable and readable than the best notebook computer. And much better than than the Sony Reader seen at the top of the page which is expensive and slow in turning pages.

In England The Guardian said that when Sony’s Reader — a device specially built to be easy to read and shown a the top of this article — reaches Europe with 10,000 titles to choose from it will show whether the concept works. The Guardian plainly has not tested the Sony Reader and is ignoring its price.

What might work is if Google went on to Alibaba, the Chinese commercial quantities trading site, and badged something like the reader shown here, and then sold it at a fair price. Call it the GReader.

Google is right to charge ahead and try and corner some of the market in electronic books the way that Apple has done to a certain extent with iTunes. But it is playing with itself if it believes there will be a large market before a reasonable electronic book reader is available at a reasonable price.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 8:00 am under Google.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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