Friday, December 19 2003
Just days after Adobe Systems decided the e-book potential was yet worth opening its own online e-bookstore, Google is taking a dip into the e-book waters. The search giant is preparing to offer a feature, Google Print Beta (as it's called for now), to let users read pages from books on its site.
"They're a dominant player," Meta Group analyst Tim Hickernell told NewsFactor Network, "and they have to find ways to keep the service fresh so they don't lose that dominance."
Hickernell added that Google's experiment is just that, not adding much more value than "just looking up the metadata on Amazon or on the publisher's site." Indeeed, Google Print Beta is being compared to Search Inside The Book, the Amazon feature service that lets you pinpoint books based on their content, NewsFactor said. But Hickernell said this Google project wasn't likely to stay just as is for very long.
"There are a lot of directions they could take before they go commercial," he said, "and that includes what Amazon is doing by allowing full contextual searching of what is in the book."
NewsFactor said Google Print Beta could soon enough bring the search giant all the way to commercial e-book hosting. "It could also create controversy," the tech news Website added, "if book placement in regular search listings comes as a result of payment. But Google has been careful to separate paid listings." And Google doesn't get paid now for the Print Beta listings.
