The Nimble Books Blog

Official Google Blog: Hello, Pittsburgh

On Tuesday, March 4, the Google Pittsburgh office will open its doors to the technical community for a special evening. We’ll kick things off with some mingling over beer, wine and snacks, and then transition into a tech talk with one of our local engineers, Pat Stephenson.

Pat will discuss the implementation of Dapper, a low-overhead system for monitoring the performance of large, distributed applications at Google, and the tools his team has built to analyze the data in a talk titled “Dapper: It’s 11 p.m. and do you know where your RPC is?”

This is annoying because Google’s Ann Arbor office has been open for a year now and still has nothing but call center jobs. Yuk, what a disappointment.

Tags: Ann Arbor For Better Or Worse, Google Stuff by admin
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A Few Thoughts On Google Knol

Anyone writing for Knol is likely to at least peruse Wikipedia content before publishing. And if they see anything good, they are at liberty to simply lift and copy it over to Knol, and get a adsense check for their time.

So, in a way, Google has found a way to monetize Wikipedia content after all.

The name of Google Knol is a tip off that there is something basically broken in the concept — there is a damned good reason why there are no “knols” in the real world. Knowledge doesn’t come in units.

As a publisher, I wonder if there has been any thought given to how Google Knol and Google Book Search should play together. It doesn’t look like it at first glance. The sample author Knol page for Rachel Manber doesn’t even have a link to Rachel Manber on Google Book Search orGoogle Scholar. Why the heck not?

Hey Google, instead of having your engineers duplicate Wikipedia with daffy “knols”, why not involve some publishers? We know a little bit about promoting authors too… and we have this great way of binding “knols” together in paper and charging twenty or thirty bucks a package. It’s called a “book.”

Tags: Front Page, Google Stuff, What's New for Book-Lovers by admin
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Search the full text of every book published by Nimble Books

Tags: About Nimble Books, Front Page, Google Stuff, What's New for Book-Lovers by admin
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Google Apps Case Study on Nimble Books

Nimble Books sees efficiency increase with Google Apps and gains exposure for titles with Google Book Search

Tags: About Nimble Books, Front Page, Google Stuff, What's New for Book-Lovers by admin
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such as Popular Passages and the ability to link to any public domain page! (this was the original impetus for The Commonplace Book, which I launched in 1994…)

Tags: Google Stuff, The Commonplace Book by admin
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MacDailyNews - The only thing really wrong with Apple’s iPhone is its name

Back to the naming issue: Apple’s “iPhone” isn’t really a phone at all. It’s really a small touchscreen Mac OS X computer, a Mac nano tablet, it you will. Here’s how misnamed the iPhone is: some people are complaining that Jobs didn’t spend enough time on the Mac in his keynote! Folks, iPhone is not only a Mac, it’s the most radical new Mac in years! What’s to stop Apple from making a 12-inch (and larger, and smaller) one of these (use the headset for the phone, please) and calling it a Mac tablet?

I don’t want an iPhone. I don’t want to be stuck with AT&T’s pokey EDGE network and I don’t want a 3.5″ browser.

But I’d love an 8 1/2 x 11 iPhone with a hard disk and about a thousand PDF books on it… wouldn’t that make a terrific complement for Google Books? I’ve read rumors that Google and Apple are thinking about working much more closely … an iReader with iBookstore would make a lot of sense. Maybe this is where Google Book Search is going with its long-delayed “online access” option. (I submitted my pricing info for online access more than 18 months ago, and no sign of the feature yet…)

Technorati Tags: Google Book Search, iPhone tablet, tablet pc,

Tags: Front Page, Google Stuff, Tablet PC, Tech Fun, What's New for Book-Lovers by admin
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Google Code - Updates: Google Gadget Ventures

Good news for Google Gadget developers. We’ve just launched Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program for distributing grants and seed investments to gadget developers and gadget-related businesses. We’re excited about the opportunity this will give developers to build even richer, more useful gadgets and get recognized for doing it.

For the life of me I cannot fathom why Google is so excited about these Gadgets. I hate the customized Google home page. I much prefer the clean, original default. If I want a customized gadget page, I go to Yahoo!
The Gadgets must make Google money somehow, but I don’t get it.

Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo!, Google Gadgets

Tags: Front Page, Google Stuff by admin
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Google’s Marissa Mayer on The Future of Search

I saw this article where Marissa Meyer of Google gave a speech on the future of search. I was struck that not much of it was truly new from my days at LexisNexis working on the web search engine.

1. Automated Translation –ok, if they can do this, that would be pretty new!
2. Google Book Search — My former employer, LexisNexis, has had all the important books in its domain (treatises) online for ages
3. Images and Video — friends at LN were working with image search partners five years ago
4. 1-800-GOOG-411 — I had a phone query of LN working five years ago
5. Universal Search — LexisNexis was designing Universal Search for its 33,000 password-controlled premium sources five years ago.
6. Maps and Local Search — I still go to the Yellow Pages at least half the time
7. Client Software (Google Gears, Google Gadgets) — LexisNexis Mobile for the Pocket PC did offline search and retrieve (using AvantGo — remember them? syncing is not new …)
8. iGoogle — I cannot fathom why they are so excited about this. I hate the customized Google home page, I just want the clean default.

Technorati Tags: search, Google, LexisNexis

Tags: Front Page, Google Stuff, Tech Fun by admin
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LibraryThing || Catalog your books online

Down for a period of time

Situation: We lost the main “read slave.” No data was lost. (We have five copies at all times.) But we are missing a critical machine, and have to rebuild it.

The blog still works. Abby has proposed a “down” bookpile contest…

5:11 Eastern US. Downtime happens, but not updating this message was inexcusable. We will keep this message up to date from now on. (Tim)

5:11 Eastern US. John is working to rebuild the machine. I suspect it will not be up tonight. (Tim)

5:46 Eastern US. No new news.

9:13 Eastern US. John’s still working hard. I promised to bake him a cake as a reward. (Abby)

10:16 Eastern US. Give us another hour or so, we’re hoping to get the site back up tonight! (Abby)

10:48pm Eastern US. Mere moments, folks. (Abby)

9:51am EST: I thought we’d scotched them, but our DB issues seem to have come back. I’m looking into them right now, will update as info comes available (John)

10:59am EST: John’s still figuring out what the problem is, and it’s looking like it’ll be a while. (That means you have more time to enter the bookpile contest - Abby

I wish the Google Books team would buy LibraryThing. As far as I can tell, the LibraryThing metadata could probably be plugged almost seamlessly into Google Book Search. Crucially, the LT community has already done much of the hard work of combining editions, which is the key to enabling effective communities around particular titles.

Technorati Tags: Google Books, LibraryThing

Tags: Front Page, Google Stuff, Tech Fun by admin
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For those interested in the business side of Google Book Search, here are some cumulative statistics for my Google Book Search publisher account from 2005 to June 2007. I now have a total of nineteen titles live.

impressions: 421,886
unique page views: 576,836
book views: 106,486
buy this book links (all vendors) 1,767
BTB clickthrough: 1.1%
Ad clicks: 3,645
Ad clickthrough: 0.9%
Total ad revenue: $314.68

About half of the impressions, BTB links, and ad revenue are associated with my best-selling title.

Tags: Front Page, Google Stuff, What's New for Book-Lovers by admin
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Official Google Blog: Cingular BlackBerry 8800 has Google Maps and GPS

Some of us have a great sense of direction, and others find themselves, well, a little lost at times. For those in the latter camp, you can thank Cingular for launching the BlackBerry® 8800, the latest open GPS-enabled device from a major U.S. carrier. That means that when you use Google Maps for mobile, your location automatically shows up on the map.

When you download Google Maps for mobile and fire it up, you’ll notice something quite unusual: a blinking blue dot showing you exactly where you are!

I hate carrier-specific tools like this and the iPhone. The blue dot is pretty cool, but also pretty Orwellian.

Technorati Tags: Cingular, Google, Blackberry

Tags: Google Stuff, Tech Fun by admin
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Official Google Blog: Getting it done with Google Apps

As you might have heard recently, in addition to search and advertising, we’re focused on a third key area of innovation: powerful applications that run on the web and that let you collaborate and communicate in new ways. Not only do we offer email, calendaring, and document creation and collaboration services (and more!) for individuals, but with Google Apps, businesses, schools and other organizations can customize these tools and use them as their own internal systems.

Here at Nimble Books we use Google Apps throughout the process of publishing. the “baked-in” collaboration features are a great help.

* Contracts are negotiated using Google Docs
* Sales and royalties are tracked and shared on a daily basis using a Google spreadsheet. (Those not familiar with publishing may not realize what a huge increase in transparency this is over the normal six-months-late cryptic royalty statement).
* When authors request review copies, they use a Google Spreadsheet to enter address info (this is a great advantage over the normal e-mail with a half-complete address!)
* When we do marketing campaigns, we import .csv contact lists into Google Mail and use tags to create a “loosely structured” mailing database. Free is a much better price than commercial contact management services which start around $2,000!

If you’re interested in learning more about how we publish, see Why Publish With Us.

Technorati Tags: Google Apps

Tags: About Nimble Books, Front Page, Google Stuff, Tech Fun by admin
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