Google announces eBooks | Hacker News Reader

Google announces eBooks

googleblog.blogspot.com

144 pointsadambyrtek89 comments

I got a Kindle in August, which has a similar "all your books in our cloud" approach. Now I worry about Amazon being able to cancel or delete my account, cutting me off from every book I bought in the Kindle Store. I feel like that's giving them too much power.

The same problem exists with the new Google ebooks service.

I back up my computer with Time Machine and Carbonite. I'm not worried about losing the ebooks stored on my computer. I don't need Amazon or Google to "keep my books safe."

Compare to O'Reilly Media: "Whenever possible we provide [eBooks] to you in five DRM-free file formats — PDF, ePub, Kindle-compatible .mobi, DAISY, and Android .apk — that you can use on the devices of your choice." (from their website)

Music from iTunes is similar to eBooks from O'Reilly: no DRM, download the files and store them yourself.

They say that you can download ePub or PDF to read "offline" or on an ereader.

http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

I believe there are backup tools for the Kindle that strip out the DRM and save the books to your PC.

But essentially this is the same risk as your house burning down and taking your books with it. I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

I have home insurance, so if my house burns down I get the cash to buy replacement books. I doubt that they'd pay out if Amazon shut down Kindle.

I think amazon has shown that they at least pay you back after they take away your book. Not that its good that they can take away your books though.

That's why I never bought a Kindle.It's like paying for a book but be forced to keep it only at the shopkeeper's shelf. Kindle means I don't own the book I have paid for. Giving them too much power is another thing that I'm wary of. So I still use various mail accounts, various options for online activities instead of going ga-ga over all things G.

I see Kindle purchases as a gamble on Amazon's good conduct, and I think it's a good gamble. The amount of leverage Kindle customers have over Amazon is phenomenal. I buy thousands of dollars of physical books and other merchandise through them every year. (By comparison, I don't spend more than $200 per year on Kindle books.) If they ever screwed me on my Kindle books, I would shop on Amazon, read the reviews, and then spend an extra five minutes per purchase finding somewhere else to order. I don't think I'm atypical for a Kindle customer, either in my high spending on Amazon or my willingness to go shop elsewhere. If they screw Kindle customers, they will pay for it dearly, and that's good enough for me.

That's why I never bought a Kindle.It's like paying for a book but be forced to keep it only at the shopkeeper's shelf.

I don't know of any actual Kindle owners who feel that way.

Right because those of us that feel that way, don't buy Kindles.

Is it just me or is their bookstore search awful? I've tried various programming subjects (software, software engineering, computer graphics, etc.) and always get results like "Report of the 55th National Conference on Weights and Measures 1970" or "Veterans' Administration FY 1988 budget"

If it's anything like the Android App Store search on my phone, I think I'll stick with my Kindle, or real books. I'm confused how a company that made search work so well has such poor offerings for things like my apps or these books. What gives?

Android App search is terrible. Now this bookstore is too.

You'd think Google could get search right.

GMail search is awful as well.

Same here. Searching for books I already own on Kindle returns completely different books unrelated to the book I am searching for. Searching for author and title does not help. For instance, searching for "probability theory sivia" returns books on biology, the JFK assassination, fish oil, "standards and expectations", theatre, etc., and one book on "Le raisonnemet bayesien" which may have something to do with probability theory. But it does not return the book on probability theory by Sivia.

Edit: See for yourself: http://books.google.com/ebooks?as_brr=5&q=probability+th...

Maybe it was a temporary problem. I did a search for machine learning and the results look fine to me: http://books.google.com/ebooks?q=machine+learning

Depends on your definition of "fine", here's the first 7 results from that URL:

  - Library of Congress 1993
  - Library of Congress subject headings 1980
  - Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series 1962
  - Mezzofanti's System of Learning Languages Applied to the Study of French. (Close, but no cigar)
  - Wildlife and oceans in a changing climate
  - Occupational outlook handbook

That's not what I see at Ben's link - the results I see are completely relevant:

Machine learning - Kai-Zhu Huang, Hai-Qin Yang, Irwin King

Machine learning techniques for multimedia - Matthieu Cord, Pádraig Cunningham

Advances in machine learning applications in software engineering - Du Zhang, Jeffrey J.-P. Tsai

Machine learning in cyber trust - Jeffrey J. P. Tsai

Machine learning for multimedia content analysis - Yihong Gong, Wei Xu

Data analysis, machine learning and applications - Christine Preisach

Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition - Petra Perner

Interesting, it hints at some "machine learning"/"behavioural targeting" on Google's end then.

The search excludes books that are not available for sale in your region, which probably includes everywhere outside the U.S.

You're not in the US, this is all you'll be able to see.

Try a US VPN :)

Yeah, it has some remarkable similarities to Google Video.

Same for me

Same here. And no advanced search?

And once again non-Americans are left out sigh

I can't help laughing when they even write about how incredibly open they are.

And what, even the video is private ? I'm guessing it's just location blocked. .. but why??

I don't think this is google's fault.

I think it is still too hard to turn a book into an ebook. Google did a fine job of digitizing a bunch of library title, but that wont do it.

They have to share a spread that technology (make it cheap). I want to put my books into a backpack, go to a store nearby and pick my books up the next day together with the ebooks. In germany that would not be against the law, because it's a private copy. Maybe for 10 bucks per book (1Cent/page?).

That would jumpstart the whole ebook thing in europe ... finally.

This is my naive consumer perspective, not a publisher perspective.

Think about it. Really hard. In your visualizations use terms like "licensing" and "international". You may find enlightenment this way.

> Think about it. Really hard.

No need to think hard about it: Google simply doesn't give a shit. Really. Let me remind you that, almost two years in, Google Voice is still completely and utterly useless outside of North America.

> You may find enlightenment this way.

Enlightenment as to why the video of their ebooks demo would be region-locked?

Well, in Canada at least, there's pretty immovable legislation preventing them from rolling it out.

What legislation is that?

> No need to think hard about it: Google simply doesn't give a shit.

This is a big call. There are many, many factors that prevent a global release of something like Books.

No. There are many factors which make it harder, and Google can't be arsed to make an effort and they only open products internationally when that requires next to none. That's exactly what they've always done.

All my visualization came with was the words "bloody fucking racists", "typical Goggle" and "screw that, they are available on certain ship related sites for free."

What did you visualize?

Racist is an awfully strong word.

You may not like it, but it's surely just pragmatism on their part. It requires a considering investment in lawyers and time for each country they launch in, so it makes sense to start with their home (and likely largest) market.

last time I checked, the USA has pretty much people from all races.

Most US companies will launch something in English only with the domestic market in mind to test the waters, then when it becomes economically viable to do so expand licensing and other issues out to other countries.

I'm sure the companies that innovate in your country do the same.

Coming from a small nation, doing anything tech-focused and not launching internationally is hard for me to wrap my head around. But I guess the factors in play here are a) a huge domestic market and more significantly b) the inevitable licensing issues that other commenters have pointed out.

I am non-American, too. Apple will let me buy English books as long as I have a valid US Apple ID. Go to Ebay, buy a US iTunes gift card, and you have one. Amazon will let me buy English books as long as I have a US credit card. That one is harder to get a hold of. You need friends. Google now needs a credit card and an IP address. The latter can be done easily and legally through services like socksify.com or even tor.

You can get technical literature from PragProg or OReilly from anywhere. There are plenty of good small ebook publishers out there.

It should come as no surprise that Google searches for ebooks rate piracy-related sites higher than ebook shops. It is currently way harder to buy an ebook than to pirate it.

But book publishers suck in the same way record companies suck. And they will go the same way record companies went.

You might want to check amazon again. I live in Australia, and I just recently bought 2 books from amazon Japan.

I'm in south america and I'm not blocked.

No Kindle support (though the web reader looks E-ink friendly). Amazon really needs to open up their SDK and allow you to write book-readers - they could grab a huge market if they did. As-is, they may be left hurting if they don't explicitly support this, especially if Google's claim of "the world's largest selection of ebooks" is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt it).

Amazon should rather support epub format if they care to have some success in Europe and maybe some other non-US markets.

ePub is not the problem. It is the Adobe DRM that is comes baked into most ePub documents that are sold.

Which (I'm very sad to see, but maybe it'll change in time) Google has adopted :\

I'm not so much. My sony reader is compatible with Adobe DRM. :)

Or Google could release the books in DRM free format. Then it'll work on Kindle.

I don't see how having more than one app for reading books on a kindle would help me, the user. I want to read books, not juggle apps.

How about a research-assisting app, for text books? I wouldn't want the standard reading app to do what it would do, the extra UI elements would get in the way. And I wouldn't want to be stuck to a single one, there are multiple paradigms for different use-cases. So either clutter, or options-overload.

Similarly, from everything I've seen on E-ink devices, I could write a reader I'd be much happier with. For instance: half-page updates so one can speed-read without pausing between pages. Without the ability to do so, they're relying solely on their internal developers to make correct decisions for everyone.

I don't think they're gonna do it unless they give up DRM on their books. If third parties are allowed to write reader apps, then it would be almost impossible for Amazon to enforce DRM on its users.

The Kindle can already read DRM-free Mobipocket and PDF ebooks.

amazon sells books, and let's you read them on any device, their own Kindle included. They would see that opening their device up to Google or others will reduce the amount of books that they can sell. It would be similar to Apple opening up iPods to Windows encrypted/DRMed music files.

"Google eBooks can be downloaded onto all eReader devices that run Adobe Digital Editions"[0]

In other words: "Adobe DRM"

[0] http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=179863

  1. Get a group of friends together with similar reading tastes.
  2. Create a new shared Google account.
  3. Share books.
  4. Profit? (Any reasons this wouldn't work?)

Assuming they will restrict the account to signing on from one location at a time, it would be the equivalent of loaning others books in e-readers that allow it.

Or the equivalent of a bunch of people sharing a Steam account.

You might start reading a book on your computer at home in the morning, and you might leave that open as you rush off to work. You might open a second copy on your e-reader as you go to work, and so on.

Therefore there are natural use cases where you have the same Google account logged into Google ebooks on multiple devices at the same time.

Therefore Google must allow for those use cases.

Those use cases can be mimicked by friends sharing a Google account.

Google could check for obvious misuse. For example, they could look for two devices separated by a large distance and using the same Google account with Google ebooks at the same time. I know they already do something like that with Gmail (for a different reason).

In those cases it can auto-logout of the previously connected platforms, the same way Steam does.

What if I'm writing a paper on the books of Bill Bryson, I want to have In a Sunburned Country open on my MacBook, and I want to have Notes from a Small Island open on my iPhone (at the same time)?

There are legitimate reasons to have two devices logged into Google ebooks with the same account at the same time.

Video games are different. Few people play two video games at the same time.

Looks like they definitely just scanned some books. I downloaded a sample of "Information Theory and Statistical Learning" and the font was too pixelated and thus unreadable on my android device unless I zoomed in. Zooming in only evidences the pixelation even more.

An O'Reilly book seemed fine, so I want to imagine that technical/math-notation intensive books are hard to optimize for e-reading. Anyone have some knowledge about this? How hard is it to make a technical book's digital font easier to read if you don't already have the LaTeX/pdf?

I think this takes our personal library into the ubiquitous cloud, which is great. But again, the key question is, will Google be able to integrate with existing eBooks like Kindle, Nook or Plastic Logic. That will be the one big thing that will determine their success...

Another cool feature I really like is the ability for small bookstores to create their own storefront. That is a smart move. By opening the cloud, they will capitalize on the marketplace created by someone else.

Nook is on the list, but no Kindle. Though, ultimately, anything with web access. The web reader looks pretty minimal, it'd probably run fine on an E-ink device like the Kindle.

http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing/supported-devices

Anyone remember Google Video? Me neither.

Amazon and Apple own the ebook market and Google doesn't even have a tablet. Can you read Google ebooks on a Kindle? So much for read anywhere. Sorry Google but you're late for the party.

That's why there are standards, and the Google Bookstore supports two standards (ePub and PDF).

You know, there are also people out there with Sony, BeBook, and iRiver readers.

Both the ePub and PDF are DRM encumbered. I would not call those "standards".

and there are people put there with MP3 players that are not iPods. There are thousands of brands, but I cannot recall any right now.

I've only done a quick skim, but their prices are really high. The ebook version of many programming books are more expensive than their paper counterparts at amazon.

I've been going nuts the last couple of months buying books from O'Reilly. It's great, I can put them on my iPad, my iPod Touch, my laptop, my desktop, whatever can read an ePub or a PDF. And no one can "recall" them. I have zero interest in any other deal as far as ebooks are concerned.

"We designed Google eBooks to be open."

How exactly is this open?

The formats are open, ePUB and PDF. It is doesn't appear to me that you can actually download the files.

• Android and iOS have dedicated reader apps that support offline reading. Something is downloaded, but it might well be DRM wrapped.

• Web browser based reading appears to be online only. No mention of downloading and using your own native reader on a laptop.

• The interesting one is the nook. For nook the book is transferred into the native nook reader. Sounds like there might be some way to get the book in that process, or maybe they have already DRM'd it with B&N's blessing.

Please, I already have a book reading app I like. I don't want your vanity take on what a book reader should be. Just sell me the book.

They mention how 'open' it is, however I want to know about the DRM of it? IMHO you can't be fully open with DRM.

apparently they mean 'open' in the sense of 'restricting users via DRM' and 'locks out most of the world'

Can anyone deduce what the DRM position is on books sold via Google Books?

Closest I can get is http://books.google.com/help/ebooks/content.html which says PDF and ePUB formats that might have DRM in them -- but I wasn't aware there was any (significant) DRM in PDF format.

I read somewhere it was Adobe's.

Why not support the Kindle? Creating books in the Kindle format is easy enough. I don't understand this decision.

Answer my own question: ""The reader itself is built in Java, and will be accessible on mobile devices via the browser or the standalone apps — the Android app should be available now, and the iOS app will be so soon.""

The kindle is also implemented with Java (on top of Linux).

It is easy enough to author .mobi files compatible with Kindle, but Amazon doesn't let others create their own DRM'ed ebooks.

Finally! One more reason to boycott Amazon.

What? No Kindle support?

What kind of asinine universe are we creating for ourselves? This is what I never understood about iTunes:

1. The world discovers MP3s: music that you can listen to on any digital music player! You know how you can take a tape cassette and play it in any cassette player, and hear music? It's like that! Yay!

2. iTunes sells iTunes music: music that you can listen to on... Apple devices! Wait, what?

You mean I can download digital music from iTunes, but it might not work on my digital music player?

It must be because it's better, then. What's that? There's no technical advantage? I am confused!

Now it's happening again! We have eBooks of various assortments. You read eBooks with eReaders. Unless they're incompatible. How can you tell? Well, it depends on where you bought each of them. It's getting to where you need a damn chart.

We don't make cars that only run on certain fucking roads. Why do we make music that only plays on certain fucking music players?!

I know all about DRM, and the incentives behind it. I know "why" it works this way. I'm just lamenting how stupid it is that we are making things more complicated, and less inter-operable. It's fucking 2010. We're in the future now. We should know better.

An e-book's container format is (essentially) orthogonal to whether or not it has DRM.

Kindle uses a convoluted, badly designed container, where everyone else uses ePub, which is an open standard.

Bottom line: There is not Kindle support because Kindle is too picky.

iTunes sells AAC music files: music that you can listen to on any device that supports AAC, which is a part of the MPEG-4 standard (just like MP3 is a part of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards). This AAC music used to be sold with Apple DRM on it, but no longer does. And of course there is a technical advantage; AAC sounds better at low bit rates than MP3 does.

Someone should make an ebooks site that uses Dropbox as a backend. Local file control is a really important part of keeping files secure in the cloud. Controled from a single company is really just control with a single point of failure.

I think Kindle works the same way. It's just that they can come and seize any of your books whenever they feel like it. Dropbox will not be much different because if they delete a file on their server and enforce updates on all of your machines, it will lead to the same result.

dropbox not being a single company?

I meant that you'll have a copy on all of your machines.

"Google eBooks is all about choice, so you can use just about any device you own to read any book, anywhere." Aslong as you buy the book from google and use googles software. Isnt that the oposite of choice?

Works fine using a US VPN from Germany

Keep Innovating Google..

What is it with Amazon that makes it possible for them to sell eBooks to anywhere in the world no questions asked?

I hate DRM and I love my B&N nook, but fuck it, I want Amazon to make Kindle app for nook!

Really tired of seeing "not available in your part of the world yet" for the last few years in most eBook stores.

Amazon do not sell ebooks equally everywhere. I often follow a link to a book from a blog or the like only to be told the Kindle version 'is not available in my region' (Canada).

Amazon is not selling eBooks to anywhere. Yes, selling in 100+ countries is impressive, but there are 200+ of them.

still, 100 > 1

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