#comments

Just warming up the Kindle blogging muscles for the Amazon event next monday (Feb 9). But I read a few posts about Google’s just launched Book Search Mobile – which is a mobile interface to the OCR’d full text of a crapper full of public domain books (where 1 crapper full = 1.5 million books). This is definitely pretty cool, but then I started seeing how people were suggesting that this was a competitor for Amazon’s Kindle. I wholeheartedly disagree with this notion.

On the face of it it’s a reasonable comparison to make. Broadly speaking they both provide the text of books on your mobile device. Even extrapolating to future functionality – let’s assume that at some point Google gearsifies this thing so that you can download books and read them offline (something impossible right now) the lack of which currently makes it a non-starter in the competition department.

Given that, this is still not a Kindle competitor – in order for it to be a competitor it has to compete for the same business, right? Google’s library, large as it is, is all public domain – in book language that means old as heck. Books from like the 1800’s and early 1900’s. Which is cool, but those aren’t the big sellers that Amazon is looking for. Amazon likes them new books, same as the publishers, same as the majority of the book reading public. So the person looking for the latest Danielle Steele isn’t going to check out Book Search Mobile instead of picking up a Kindle to read that on the beach. Nor is the person looking for Edward Carpenter’s Poems Towards Democracy most likely looking to pick it up on his Kindle. Well, maybe he’d like to pick it up on his Kindle but he won’t be able, too…

Which brings up the point – in fact – this could help the Kindle out if Amazon decided to provide a Kindle interface to Google’s service. It’s free, after all. For all the same reason’s that I wouldn’t want to read a long book on my iPhone or my computer and might on a Kindle – the Kindle could become the best user interface for reading these. It may be a selling point for the hardware, picking up some loooong tail slack that Kindle publishers were never going to get to anyway.

As for getting newer books in Book Search, given the nose dive that advertising’s taken and all the publishers suing the hell out of Google when this service was announced so many years back, I think it is safe to assume that that is not coming anytime soon.

With some analyst estimates (please take with several grains of salt) that the Kindle has actually outperformed the original iPod, I remain confident that eBooks and the Kindle in particular are set for a slower than iPod surge, but a surge nonetheless. I believe that off the web ePublishing is going to happen, because nobody wants to read long form on a computer screen or a tiny phone. What’s your stance on this? You think it’s all hogwash?

PS What’s effect/relationship does all this public domain ocr’ing have with Project Gutenberg?