Google?
Don't you ever wonder what they are up to? World domination?
Craig and I were talking about the whole Google books thing and trying to figure out where they are going with it. How are they going to profit from it etc. The whole thing is rather scary, especially when you add it to other projects they have going on. Did you know that Google will help transport large datasets between collaborating research groups? The caveat is that the drives have to travel via Google HQ so that the information can be copied by them. This is for unencrypted, non-copyright data of course.
It adds up to a disturbing picture.
We were hypothesising that they may be planning to break into the e-book market with a bang. There is so much potential in this area and it's starting to take off but is being hampered by the lack of good handheld hardware options and no consensus on software format. Google could conceivably be working on some snazzy e-book software. Just imagine, it could be integrated into wave, chrome, android. They'd virtually have a captive audience of techies.
If they could couple that with good relationships with publishers and a halfway decent hardware solution, coupled with their scanned books they could totally blow the Kindle out of the water. I would imagine that the software would be free and you'd pay a fee for access to an aggregation of books put together by Google. They'd probably even give generous bulk discounts the way that journal aggregators do for libraries.
Before we know it, we could be relying on Google for the majority of our books. If they could make the bulk deals affordable enough, it would probably encourage a lot of people to switch from paper. Of course it would do very bad things to libraries, not to mention the many disquieting implications of having so much knowledge being purveyed by a public company...
What do you think they're up to? Do you think they have any chance of acting altruistically with regards to their book scanning project? What worries you the most?
Craig and I were talking about the whole Google books thing and trying to figure out where they are going with it. How are they going to profit from it etc. The whole thing is rather scary, especially when you add it to other projects they have going on. Did you know that Google will help transport large datasets between collaborating research groups? The caveat is that the drives have to travel via Google HQ so that the information can be copied by them. This is for unencrypted, non-copyright data of course.
It adds up to a disturbing picture.
We were hypothesising that they may be planning to break into the e-book market with a bang. There is so much potential in this area and it's starting to take off but is being hampered by the lack of good handheld hardware options and no consensus on software format. Google could conceivably be working on some snazzy e-book software. Just imagine, it could be integrated into wave, chrome, android. They'd virtually have a captive audience of techies.
If they could couple that with good relationships with publishers and a halfway decent hardware solution, coupled with their scanned books they could totally blow the Kindle out of the water. I would imagine that the software would be free and you'd pay a fee for access to an aggregation of books put together by Google. They'd probably even give generous bulk discounts the way that journal aggregators do for libraries.
Before we know it, we could be relying on Google for the majority of our books. If they could make the bulk deals affordable enough, it would probably encourage a lot of people to switch from paper. Of course it would do very bad things to libraries, not to mention the many disquieting implications of having so much knowledge being purveyed by a public company...
What do you think they're up to? Do you think they have any chance of acting altruistically with regards to their book scanning project? What worries you the most?