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Publishers can beat free Google eBooks
Comments
Yes! There is the reading experience, how the text appears as well as research tools. I could envision publishers teaming up with, let's say, semantic search engines, or sources of historical maps, or paid services like Visual Thesaurus, to give students and scholars help in navigating texts from different traditions. As a personal example, I made sense of the context while reading War and Peace by having handy the historical map that correlated troop movement with temperatures during the Napoleonic Wars.
In my opinion, this author's views should be disregarded. The current state of the Google Books offering is still embryonic. What is most obvious is the errors in the .epub versions of the books. However, the quality of the OCR work is much better than it was only a year ago, so that it's clear that once of these days the error rate for most of these books will be almost zero.
The .pdf versions provide "as scanned" quality. There is an issue that at the moment, Google is not a library .. so it has done nothing with "collection management". This will be an open issue for users in the future.
At the moment, Google is claiming about 1M books in .epub format and maybe 2M in .pdf format. These numbers will grow, particularly as "the settlement" is finalized.
With the coming of the Plastic Logic device, the larger screens will begin to relieve some of the pressure that graphics-intensive, or multi-column, books have put on the smaller Kindle/Sony readers.
And then there is the coming of the "real ebook"--with on-board dictionaries, multiple wireless interfaces, a good search capability, longer battery life, good PC-based library management, voice-recording/playback capabilities .. and the list goes on.
No doubt there will always be people who want "books". These people will be around for a while. But these new devices will so change the playing field that the "game" will be very different in only five years.
Thanks for your observations, Ron, everything you say makes great sense.







