Program to promote books in Google Print

By Lars Iselid

(October 14 2004) Google’s latest move is to let publishers automate promotion of their full text e-books. This is similar to what Amazon has been doing for a while where you can get access to scanned books in full text just by submitting a credit card number. Books from Amazon, Google and others can be searched for in the search engine A9.

Earlier Google Print has only had a simple form for entering excerpts of books along with bibliographical information (title, author, ISBN and more) in their index. Now this material has been removed from Google Print (except from the article material).

Just as news from Google News gives separate hits in your search results, now so does Google Print. A search for the following book title best short hikes in northwest oregon will show you an example of how this may look on a results page.

No doubt this change is made in answer to A9 and its fantastic services and a natural development of Google Print. There is a catch, though. Searchers can only access a limited amount of the contents of any book each month (Will this be controlled by cookies?) Also, you can only turn two pages back or forward. The advantage is that you don’t have to submit your credit card number like in A9.

Google will link from the book material to online bookstores, but will not charge for the links. In stead they plan on making money on ads in the index of e-books and even sharing revenue with the publishers. This way Google hopes that more publishers will make full text version of their books available online and offer publishers an effective way to promote their books.

Search Engines like A9 and Google are more and more starting to expose full text material that has been available in libraries for years. This may increase the quality of the hits but at the same time one wonders if it will be the books of the best quality that will be available in full text. Librarians have an important task in informing our Googling fellow citizens about what Google and A9 can offer right now and what libraries can offer electronically.

Tour of Google Print’s program for promoting full text e-books

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine Datormagazin, He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

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