Google Print to Sell Ebooks

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Will BookSurge (Amazon) and A9 or Google Print equal book on demand?

Today (March 10th, 2006) I got the e-mail I've been waiting for since signing up with Google Print on the first day. Google will enable publishers to charge for downloadable and printable versions of books in the program that were previously only avaliable for search. The split I just heard from them was 70% for the publisher, 30% for Google, which I hope will eventually replace the money I was earning publishing ebooks through Lightning Source. Maybe it's justified by the fact that they'll be handling all the marketing, sort-of. Google is letting publishers add books to the program now, but they won't be available for sale until the new agreement is approved and the infrastructure is in place. I'm waiting for the next step, which I wrote about last year in the rest of this article, namely, Google moving into print-on-demand.

Amazon surprised the print-on-demand community in April by purchasing BookSurge outright. BookSurge had long been known as an innovative on-demand printer with great marketing, we must have had four different BookSurge reps on out discussion list in the past couple years. I thought long and hard about including BookSurge in my book about the print-on-demand publishing business, but I left them out in the end because I wasn't convinced that their distribution model was useful for the average publisher. Now that Amazon has purchased them, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume BookSurge will be able to offer their publishers something better that the old Marketplace back-door in the near future.

There's plenty of speculation in the print on demand publishing world as to why Amazon acquired BookSurge. The first thing that occurred to me was that they've been reading Barnes&Noble's annual statements, and have seen how B&N has raised their goal of publishing 5% of the books they sell to 10%. Maybe Amazon wants to be in the manufacturing business, a completely vertical operation. But publishing is a tough game, and even with the bully pulpit of the worlds largest bookstore, it's hard to picture Amazon getting a list right enough, quick enough, to make a difference in their future.

Then it occurred to me, maybe Amazon is hoping to put the BookSurge technology together with all the PDF's they've accumulated for the Search Inside program, and be able to offer publishers a royalty scheme on books printed and sold by Amazon! It could be a big win for out-of-print books and for small publishers who are currently supplying Amazon through the Advantage program, dribbling in a couple books at a time. In any case, the BookSurge/Amazon combination will be able to offer Lightning Source real competition for the first time in the printing and distributing on-demand books, because Amazon in itself is such a significant market for those sales.

Looking to the future, it wouldn't surprise me if some hybrid of Amazon's Search Inside and Google Print end up being the main electronic book play that everybody has been waiting for. If Amazon has actually been scanning the Search Inside books at a high enough resolution, they could easily find themselves (in association with publishers) in the Print-on-Demand business, printing and delivering books directly to customers. Whether Google Print does something similar with their own proposed book initiative, or whether they end up providing the actual search returns for Amazon remains to be seen.

At first, it seemed like Google Print was ignoring the scanned interiors of books and only producing matches based on the exact title or the author's name. Later it became apparent that they are at least experimenting with using the full results from the text when a Google search query is prefaced with "book" or "books." In addition to activating the full Google Print search, putting "book" or "books" before a Google query also triggers the product results, which appear over the book results. Apparently the product results are only coming up for books that are also included in Google Print. For example, a search on

book tracy kidder

brings up both product results and book results for Kidder books,

while a search on

book stephen king

brings up no product results, and only book results from books in the Google Print program that mention King, no books authored by him.

Google Print will indexes the entire contents of a book, but will limit the amount that can be read for free. The default percentage for how much of a book can be flipped through on Google Print is 20%, but the publisher can choose to make as much as 100% of the book readable for free. Google will list various online retail channels through which the book can be purchased, including the publisher website, and the publisher can assign Google Print a different order page for each title.

When Amazon Search Inside the Book was introduced, there was an active debate over whether or not it would help sales. Amazon reported that early participants in the program experienced average sales gains in the low double digits, approximately 13%. My personal opinion at the time was that Search Inside would hurt reference books, since people rarely read reference books cover to cover, and looking up the information on Amazon would now be easier than actually buying the book and looking in the index! Wrong again:-)

After several months of tracking books from the original Search Inside crop, and watching the sales ranks of books added to the database, I concluded that publishers can't afford to ignore the program, and I signed up myself. The reason is that books included in the program end up being accessed more often than books that aren't in the program. This apparently causes Amazon to deem them more popular than the books which aren't in program, which gives them an advantage in the Most Popular sort. I've seen books with perfect key phrase matches in the title and very strong sales lose their positions at the top of Amazon searches to books that don't sell as well and don't include a keyword title match. The only factor these usurping books had going for them was inclusion in the Search Inside program. Since the Most Popular results are often the first and only search results a customer will see, publishers who don't join the Search Inside program risk losing significant sales to the competition.

Amazon launched their A9.com search engine over a year ago, which industry analysts have assumed would compete with Google. However, Google provides the actual web searching capability to A9, just as it provides the web search capability on the Amazon website. Granted, Yahoo! and Google once had a tight relationship that came to an end after Yahoo! bought Overture and shifted to Inktomi web search results, but Yahoo! obviously wants to be in the search business. Amazon is basically focused on the retail business, and if they can sell more merchandise by teaming with Google rather than becoming the fourth wheel in search behind Google, Yahoo! and MSN, I believe they will. Amazon has also added the capabilities of their Alexa site to A9 and directly to their website by assigning Amazon item numbers to all the sites in Alexa!

The most interesting feature of A9 to authors and publishers is that it incorporates Amazon's Search Inside the Book results. Publishers and authors who are signed up with the Search Inside program will remember that Amazon reserved the right to add the Search Inside functionality to other Amazon sites, though not everybody was aware they were going into the search portal business. The only potential downside I see is if it ends up competing with the author or publisher websites that have their whole books, or excerpts of their books online, like this site does. If the website does a better job selling the books than the Search Inside results, but the Search Inside results take precedence, it could result in a net loss of sales. I'm hoping that the new results will be complimentary instead, either coming in below the Search Inside results due to the Google PageRank algorithm or by design. For the time being, the A9 search inside results are buried in a side-bar the user has to manually open, and seem to have no effect on sales.

So, will we see Google acquire a print-on-demand provider like Amazon's acquisition of BookSurge? The two companies seem to be moving in similar directions in some ways, though Google has done a much better job capitalizing on electrons (ie, advertising) than Amazon, who's main sales remain material items. However, Amazon has succeeded in raising their own electronic income (via Marketplace) every quarter, and if I recall their annual report, it's up around 1 in 4 items old off the Amazon site. So there's a hole in my theory, they've gone and moved a major Marketplace vendor (BookSurge) under their own roof, where they're stuck with merchandise, if not inventory. Still, the BookSurge acquisition shows that Amazon is still capable of surprising us, and I'm betting they're going to have an impact on the book business, beyond print on demand.

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