04/10/06

Jason Epstein on Google

Jason Epstein, whom I blogged earlier this year, has reviewed a number of books in the current New York Review.

The books include the long tail, but mainly cover Google and it’s incredible story. Included in the reviews are veteran google watcher (and, of-late, critic) John Battelle’s The Search. It’s an OK piece, and clearly positive on the influence Google will have on the future of books and how readers find them. It’s (like much of his writing) fairly expositional, and makes me want to describe it as bombast-naif, but he’s an incredibly smart guy with lots of experience and plenty of vision. For example, this sounds pretty sensible:

Spurred by Google’s initiative and by the lower costs, higher profits, and immense reach of unmediated digital distribution, book publishers and other copyright holders must at last overcome their historic inertia and agree, like music publishers, to market their proprietary titles in digital form either to be read on line or, more likely, to be printed on demand at point of sale, in either case for a fee equal to the publishers’ normal costs and profit and the authors’ contractual royalty, thus for the first time in human history creating the theoretical possibility that every book ever printed in whatever language will be available to everyone on earth with access to the Internet.

On the legal issues surrounding the Google book digitisation programme, he is equally confident of the outcome,

But for Google to provide this opportunity to its users, it must first digitize the entire text, which violates the provision of copyright law that forbids copying more than a brief passage. Lawyers for Google and the publishers will continue to exchange Talmudisms on this conflict until book publishers decide to enter the digital world to everyone’s advantage including their own and that of their authors. The issue will then be moot. Meanwhile the lawyers quibble and bill.

The overall outcome of Epstein’s piece is that book digitisation will not lead to lots of books being read on screen, nor to them being printed out on a4 to sit in awkward, expensive stacks of manuscripts. The logical conclusion is for an integration with a ‘book atm’, connected to millions of digitised books and able to print and bind them in seconds.

Perhaps unsurprisingly Epstein uses the platform to push his identical vision for the future of books-on-demand, coupled with his startup and its Book Espresso machine.

I don’t blame him, and nor do I think it’s a poor vision - I’m just not sure on how realistic it is. In fact I love the idea, but have some fundamental problems.

First of all I can’t see a publishing industry, retail infrastructure and printing business allowing it to happen; although what can they do if it achieves critical mass? My second thought is personal and relates to production qualities which most POD machines certainly do not have.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Future of the book, Google print, Publishing, Reading.