Yes and no.
Yes: I upload all books published by Nimble Books to Google Book Search, Amazon Search Inside the Book, and Amazon Upgrade. There is a lag of 1-4 months after nominal publication date before the book actually appears in those places. As you may know, once the Google author settlement is closed, Google will begin offering PDF downloads of “their” books.
No: my stance on e-books is that I am waiting until I can deploy my entire list (which includes many color books with high production values) to a device that can read and display near-full-size (~ 8 x 10) color PDFs. Tech-savvy readers will be aware that the Kindle DX claims to have a native PDF reader and a low-res (150 pixel per inch) grayscale display … but at this writing, Amazon has not yet answered the $64 million question: whether there will be a way for publishers to deploy their PDFs to Kindle via the Amazon DTP system or their Mobipocket subsidiary.
From an email to a guy who’s got a project to integrate the world of physical “codex” books with electronic resources.
I have been thinking about the challenge of integrating physical and digital worlds via tools like the sBook and I have a suggestion. I think you need to be designing at a higher level of abstraction: really, designing a standard instead of a device.
Think about it this way.
Class of bibliographic entities:
- printed book (i think “codex” is too jargony)
- journal article
- report
- e-book
Class of physical Enablers
- CueCat
- Kindle
- Sony E-Reader
- the sBook enabler
Class of citation services, e.g.
- Legal standards (West, F.2d 1033)
- Scientific standards: Nature 355:321 12 October
- Digital Object Identifiers
Class of web resources
- Single purpose websites (1 per book)
- Google Book repository
- Amazon catalog
- LibraryThing
Class of web services
- Annotation
- Discussion
- Recommending
Right now, we have a variety of entities pursuing efforts to connect all these classes with single threads or paths, e.g. Amazon connects e-book documents with Kindle with the Amazon catalog with recommending. Kindle is a closed system so that thread is the only you one can follow if you own the Kindle class of Enabler.
Tthe proposed sBook would connect codex books using a custom-built Enabler with some undetermined citation format with purpose built websites and offer Discussion and Recommending services.
What is really needed, IMHO is an open architecture that allows mix and match of all these classes. I believe Kindle is eventually going to be a limited success (not a failure, just a 10% of the market type thing) because it locks the reader into a single thread of classes. I’m more optimistic about Google Book Search because I think their physical enabler will be any device that can read a PDF and I think they will eventually ave a good citation standard and robust discussion services at GBS.
Clear as mud?
Hastily,
Scary when even a plesiosaur as deadly and unblinking as Rupert Murdoch can’t bring himself to accept the implications of his own premises.
“Nobody is making money with free content on the web except search,” said Murdoch, noting the trend is particularly worrisome in the newspaper publishing, where News Corp. owns a variety of assets. “People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that’s going to have to change.”
[ no, it's not ...]
…”Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights? If you have a brand like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, you don’t have to,” said Murdoch. “You can say thanks but no thanks.”
[ no, you can't ...]
via Article – WSJ.com.
Here’s some independent research about the importance of reviews in selling books and other retail products.
Key takeaways:
- numbers matter – takeoff point after 10 or so
- a few negative (or less than 5 star reviews) actually help
- recency matters
Quote:
The sheer volume of reviews makes far mor
e difference, according to Google’s analysis of clicks and sales referrals. “Single digits didn’t seem to move the needle at all,” says Mr McAteer. “It wasn’t enough to get people comfortable with making that purchase decision.” But
via Reading online reviews | Fair comment | The Economist.
Interestingly, Google [UI consultant what is a] produces different results than [Google UI consultant what is it] , even though “it” and “a” are usually stop words:
Words that are commonly used, like ‘the,’ ‘a,’ and ‘for,’ are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search [ the who ] likely refers to the band; the query [ who ] probably refers to the World Health Organization — Google will not ignore the word ‘the’ in the first query.
I believe this is more advanced behavior than most search engines currently exhibit. Certainly when I was at LexisNexis there was no way on God’s green Earth that we were going to get the search engine folks to change the way the engine treated stop words.
The Court will hold the Fairness Hearing on June 11, 2009 at 1:00 pm EDT in Courtroom 14C of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, United States Courthouse, located at 500 Pearl Street, New York, New York 10007. The time and date of the hearing may be rescheduled by the Court without further notice.
via FAQs – Google Book Settlement.
Official Google Blog: Introducing our European 2008 Anita Borg Scholars
A few months ago we had the great pleasure of announcing the fifth class of Anita Borg Scholars in the U.S. and our first class of Scholars in Canada. Now it’s the Europeans’ turn.
What I want from personalization in the future is …
multiple profiles that become, over time, avatars.
my searches correspond to the many roles and specialized domain knowledge bases that I’ve accumulated over time — product manager, lawyer, publisher, analyst, project management professional, climate change researcher, Harry Potter fan … I want to be able to tell the system “who I am” at any given moment and have the results correspond. More than that, i want avatars that are constantly searching on all these topics and bringing me high quality documents in a serendipitous yet thorough way.
And, while you’re at it, I want them delivered onto my wireless PDF slate…
Official Google Blog: Technologies behind Google ranking
Personalization is another strong feature in our search system which tailors search results to individual users. Users who are logged-in while searching and have signed up for Web History get results that are more relevant for them than the general Google results. For example, someone who does a lot football-related searches might get more football related results for [giants], while other users might get results related to the baseball team. Similarly, if you tend to prefer results from a particular shopping site, you will be more likely to get results from that site when you search for products. Our evaluation shows that users who get personalized results find them to be more relevant than non-personalized results.
Unfortunately, when you surf through to the information about the challenge, there is absolutely no information about the quantitative results or the techniques that the winning teams used.
This would be 1000% more interesting if they revealed the CTR and conversions that the winners were able to achieve, and if they shared the written reports by the teams.
Official Google Blog: Students surf their way to success
Together, Jamie and I recruited a panel of professors from all over the globe and came up with the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Student teams had to identify a local business with a website, but no experience of online marketing, and then were given free Google AdWords vouchers worth the equivalent of US$200.
Some of these cities look a lot better in three-d than they probably look in real life. But gotta love Google for giving cities some love. Reminds me of James Blish’s Cities in Space series … maybe Google will provide a “spindizzy” tool in v.2.
Google LatLong: Cities in 3D program in action
In March, we introduced the Cities in 3D Program, empowering local governments to contribute their own 3D models to Google. Since our original announcement, we have expanded the program to Europe and been working closely with several local governments in the US to get their models published to Google Earth. After four short months, the models from our first round of participants are available. Let’s go for a brief tour to explore these new cities….
|
|
Recent Comments