ENTRIES TAGGED "Google"
Getting Google to notice your ebook
3 book SEO tips and why metadata and book covers matter to Google.
Matthew Gray, lead software engineer of Google Books Search Quality, discusses general signals Google uses to rank and display books. Plus: Three best practices for getting Google's attention.
Amazon building its own Android App Market?
A look at the pros and cons of an Amazon-run Android market.
While the carriers see the Android Market as an opportunity to build tightly-controlled versions of the Market, non-exclusivity opens the door for companies that (a) know retailing and merchandising much better than Google, (b) aren't in the awkward position of having to play nice with the carriers, and (c) have a global presence independent of carrier coverage and relationships. Enter Amazon.
William Patry delivering Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property Law at Duke
Google Senior Copyright Counsel Bill Patry, who will be one of our keynote speakers at TOC 2010, delivered a great lecture at Duke last month dissecting the “moral panic” approach to copyright debate, as exemplified by the late Jack Valenti, former CEO of the MPAA. His talk is just under 30 minutes, and then he goes into Q&A with…
Google's Browser-Based Plan for Ebook Sales
BEA '09 may be remembered as the moment when Google formally entered the ebook market. From the New York Times: Mr. [Tom] Turvey [director of strategic partnerships at Google] said Google's program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. "We…
Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement
In the fall of 2005, the Authors Guild, which then had about 8000 members, and five publishers sued Google for copyright infringement. Many copyright professionals expected the Authors Guild v. Google case to be the most important fair use case of the 21st century. This column argues that the proposed settlement of this lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the “dead souls” to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus.
Google's Distribution Advantage Has Its Limits
Scott Karp has an insightful (and provocatively titled) piece over on the Publishing 2.0 blog about just how deeply Google has inserted itself in Web distribution of content. While much of the piece is about linking, one paragraph in particular is worth calling out for traditional publishers (emphasis added): If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to…
Sony-Google Deal Adds 500k Public Domain Books to E-Reader
Sony is adding 500,000 public domain EPUB-based titles to its Reader catalog through a partnership with Google. Paul Biba at Teleread examines Sony's rationale: Sony's apparent intent, meanwhile, beyond adding value to the Reader, will be to use public domain books in ePub to entice people to install its software and in time buy its reader devices. In the…
Google Opens Mobile Access to Public-Domain Books
Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search: Today, we're making it possible for anyone with an Android or an iPhone to find and read more than 1.5 million public domain books in the US (more than half a million outside the US) in the…
Competition in the eBook Market
There's been a lot of buzz on forward-looking publisher mailing lists in the past few days about Robert Darnton's piece in the New York Review of Books, Google and the Future of Books. When it hit techmeme today, I thought it might be appropriate to share more broadly the comments I made on the Reading 2.0 list (links added, minor…
Magazines Now in Google Book Search
Google is adding back issues of magazines to its Book Search index. From the Official Google Blog: Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword] and you'll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet. Over time, as we scan more articles, you'll see…