What (and Why) In the World Is Google Print?

Google doesn't want you to search inside the book at Amazon. They want you to search inside the book at Google! That's what they're working on, anyway -- get some more skinny about it at http://print.google.com/print/faq.html .

From the FAQ: " It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites." Results are delivered along with relevant Google AdWords ads and some links to buy some books.

If you want to see what this content looks like, try this Google search: inurl:print.google.com site:google.com .

Now, I know I'm just a lonely Internet search geek who sits at home eating hummus sandwiches and typing up rants. But I feel there's a huge, huge, huge missed opportunity here.

Google, I love you, I adore you, you're the best thing since sliced peanut butter. But you could have taken this one step further. You could have taken the idea of indexing-books-like-Amazon-is-doing, and gone beyond it.

There are already umpty online collections of full e-texts made available though universities and other institutions. I'm not talking about just the Gutenberg collection, though that's very good. I'm talking about Cornell's home economics archive of over 1,500 books ( http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/000887.shtml ) or their math text archive ( http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/000098.shtml ) or the eScholarship Editions collection from UC
( http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/001283.shtml ) or the U of Michigan Making of America Collection
( http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/001177.shtml ). And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head; I'm sure there are many more. And there are going to BE more; every day I read about more digitization plans along these lines.

(Very faintly I hear someone sighing, "Google won't aggregate existing online collections, O hummus-crazed search nut, because they're already, like, online." True enough, but a) many people do not know these collections exist, b) relevant results from these collections would tend to be buried in search results, and c) the online collections gathered together by one great indexer (that would be Google) would increase the value of each individual collection tremendously. Jiminy crickets! If there's one thing the Web should have taught us, it's that raw data can have its usefulness increased a thousandfold by appropriate and consistent aggregation, annotation, and organization. But let my rant continue...)

Wouldn't it be cool, Google, if you hooked up with these institutions and turned these distinct collections into one large searchable collection? Think of the potential!

1 -- Even if you entered into some kind of revenue-sharing agreement with the institutions for AdWords displays, you'd have a HUGE number of potential page displays; more than enough for everybody.

2 -- You would instantly have a enormous archive of credible digital information that would be of use to every English- speaking educator in the world.

3 -- How about a three-way agreement between you, the institutions, and a print-on-demand vendor like iUniverse to make the out-of-copyright texts instantly available to whoever wants them? Or another three-way, revenue-sharing agreement with Kinko's to make course packs?

4 -- You could piggyback an offering of premium services onto the free full-text search; in 2002 The Gale Group announced plans to digitize 150,000 English-language titles published between 1701 and 1800. Wouldn't a Google full-text volume search be the perfect place to advertise such a service?

5 -- If this proved successful, you could consider teaming up with institutions to offer other types of aggregated collections. Some states, for instance (Florida and Missouri off the top of my head) offer digitized, searchable archives of service cards for soliders who served during WWI. Wouldn't it be lovely if those were all searchable in one large collection? Or other types of genealogical information, like Minnesota's death certificate index and Utahs's Cemeteries and Burials Database... what collections you could build up!

And there are REVENUE OPPORTUNITIES HERE! AdWord spots, of course. Premium service advertising. Affiliate relationships with institutions who sell certified copies of genealogical documents.

When I think of Amazon I think of retail. It's sensible that they arranged their "Search Inside the Book" feature with contemporary publishers and volumes. When I think of Google I think of search. It doesn't make sense to me that they're bypassing the huge number of valuable, institutionally-created, full-text online libraries in favor of going after the same kind of content that Amazon is indexing.

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