Blogs

E PURCELL

Eoin Purcell is commissioning editor for Mercier Press, Ireland’s oldest independent publishing house. He writes a blog on what is happening to publishing and books at www.eoinpurcellsblog.com

Publishers are being out-Googled

10.09.07

Sometimes I think tech people understand books better than book people. How else can you explain the fact that Google, LibraryThing and Amazon have had greater success at building online tools for books than publishers? It's not about e-books or online content so much as it's about offering simple tools and services for listing books and collecting information about them.

The recent spate of new tools from Google Book Search is a great example of what I mean. The 'My Library' service lets a user list the books they own, rate them, review them and see who else owns them. What is more, using Google's Book Search you can add a new book simply by searching for it and, when you find it, clicking a button - it's that easy.

Google offers more than just a listing feature too. They also launched 'Popular Passages', which displays sections of books that are regularly quoted or referenced on a book's information page. There was a third new service last week too, a clipping tool that allows anyone to display a clipped section of a book on their blog and, even more interestingly, to store the clip to their Google Notebook allowing for easy note and reference taking if you use both services (educational publishers beware). And that’s just Google.

So what can be done? It would be a start if all publishers offered readers the ability to engage with books on their company’s website. The ability to tag, review, rate and discuss even just the books they published. But even then we would only be trailing the work of others not pushing out the boundaries.

Perhaps it is time for the larger publishers to acquire the companies that are doing the job well. For instance rather than just teaming up with LibraryThing Random House ought to buy it outright. That would give them a huge lead in the online world of books.

Publishers do have competitive advantages of course and Penguin put one of them to good use in their recent website redesign when it included a blog from Nick Hornby. But readers still have no way to attach their data to Penguin books and Penguin do not benefit from collecting that data.

There are other tools available to us too. All publishers have huge amounts of information about the books we publish much of which is in-house and is not included in the book as sold. That information can provide insights which Google, even if it scans every book in the world as it hopes, could never match. We should be packaging that information so that it is usable and digestible allowing readers to add to it and offering it online to build new communities around books and to engage with established ones.

It is frustrating for someone who is ambitious for this industry to watch it do so little in the face of massive change. Publishers are in second place when it comes to online initiatives and we need to become competitive. Unless we shift gear, stop spending time complaining, and start pushing innovation and take risks online, the industry is going to be outmatched by other players and our readers are going to have online engagement with our books through other sources.

Add comment

By posting on this website you agree to the Bookseller Comments Policy. Comments go direct to live, please be relevant, brief and definitely not abusive. Report any "unsuitable" comments by clicking the links.

Name

Comment

Email

Comments on this article

By philip.jones@bookseller.co.uk

It seems to me that whatever Google does, it does slightly better than traditional companies. I cannot decide whether this is because of the money it has to throw at a project, the technical and web know-how, the fact that its dominance means it simply cannot fail, or just because it thinks differently about how to achieve things than traditional players. But from Google Print to Book Search, to these new library tools, the internet giant is taking a worrying stranglehold over a content stream that it has not invested a single penny in (ditto news). Perhaps 'worrying' in the wrong word?

10 Sep 07 11:28

Unsuitable?

By eoin.purcell@gmail.com

Philip, I totally agree. They do seem to do everything better. They are capturing so much value simply by adding functionality and search. We should be able to challenge them by adding that functionality ourselves or indeed improving upon it. Eoin

10 Sep 07 11:52

Unsuitable?

By Clive Keeble

Ask anyone in USA who uploads large files to Google Product Search (Froogle) and they will tell you that response time and failure percentage is now at an time high level compared to when the service started. Google is slowly imploding on the data which it is trying to store in each of its different search fields with the general search engine now overloaded with spam harvesters and outdated pages. Instead of correcting problems as they appear on existing services Google is starting up new services which appear OK for the first few months before they themselves become overloaded.

10 Sep 07 12:55

Unsuitable?

By eoin.purcell@gmail.com

Clive, Thanks for the comment! In once sense I suspect you are right, Google is setting a very ambitious goal for itself in the book field. And simultaneously in several other fields as well. On the other hand, and this is what counts, Google's front facing services (the ones our reader use) are working fine to their eyes, why else do they use them. Even if they only work moderately well they still far exceed most publishers offerings and that is the point and the worry! Eoin

10 Sep 07 13:54

Unsuitable?

By srinews@countrybookshop.co.uk

I agree that the book trade have not been innovative compared to the tech world in coming up with online tools for book lovers. It was evident in this weeks mashable.com list ''BOOKS TOOLBOX: 50+ Sites for Book Lovers''. With Reference to Google it is obvious fom their continuous purchase of other innovative companies that they have not been able to create and dominate every market they wish to be in.

10 Sep 07 22:17

Unsuitable?

By eoin.purcell@gmail.com

Hadn't spotted the The Mashable piece. What a collection of stuff they list though! Eoin

11 Sep 07 08:33

Unsuitable?

By June Austin

I can't help feeling that we are all missing the point here - it is not about who is better at utilising the internet to drive sales and market books, but more to do with the actual content itself. In other words, if people are turning to the internet in order to find books of interest, it is because the publishers themselves are not offering the customers anything that they do find interesting. Give people a real choice and not just variations on the same theme and then they will visit publishers websites, as there will be something worth actually looking at !

11 Sep 07 17:35

Unsuitable?

By eoin.purcell@gmail.com

June, I totally agree about the centrality of content. my one worry is that if the content is accessible, taggable etc on Google's site, they capture the value and for very little effort, whereas the publishers, having risked all the initial investment get relatively little! Eoin

11 Sep 07 23:50

Unsuitable?

By Adam Hodgkin

Google's efforts have been incredibly impressive; but also full of lots of mistakes (including being astonishingly 'tactless' in their negotiating style). But they have given an enormous kick-up-the-backside to the book publishing industry, and should ultimately create huge benefit to readers, writers and publishers alike. Thank God for Google. They will never be able to do what the good publishers do best and its high time that the book publishers took more initiative... just as you say. Exciting times and the industry needs to be a bit bolder, not cowering.

12 Sep 07 09:40

Unsuitable?

By June Austin

I take your point Eoin, but the publishers actually already get very little. Everybody wants their cut. My own book is sold to Gardners at 55 percent discount, 40 percent of which goes to the stores. This means, by the time print costs are taken off, that the stores actually earn more than both myself and my publisher put together - and I wrote the damn thing. Google is a double edged sword, but then again, as I am discovering, the book business can be a very cut throat place to be. You could view the searchability option that Google provides as a threat to copyright, and cetainly some readers will use that to search through a book to see what information it contains and then not buy a copy, but this happens in book stores as well. Plenty of people also buy books havig browsed through them on the shelves though or even in a library. The only difference here is that it is a cyber shelf and not a real one !

18 Sep 07 16:20

Unsuitable?

See Also