[nfais-l] NFAIS Enotes, December 2010

[Jill O'Neill]

NFAIS Enotes, December 2010

Written and Compiled by Jill O'Neill

 

Back in October, I tweeted the Really Strategies User Conference. The
closing speaker of the day was a gentleman from Google who discussed the
much anticipated launch of Google Editions. As is the case with most Google
presentations in such group environments, the speaker delivered a
well-crafted presentation with many bright graphics aimed at distracting the
audience from recognizing that little hard information is actually being
shared. The presentation reiterated what was already known - that Google's
foray into electronic books would at least match the baseline experience of
Amazon's Kindle reading environment. Readers could read the title of their
choice on the device of their choice and by extension at the appropriate
time, and allowing for the appropriate context.

 

On December 6, 2010, Google's eBookstore launched with an announcement on
the Official Google Blog that also gave away little hard information. The
rebranded Google eBooks launched with 3 million titles (with a percentage of
those being public domain titles that were part of the Google book scanning
project). The piece referenced statistics from the extended Google Books
project -- 15 million scanned titles from more than 40 libraries in 100
countries and in more than 400 languages. (Google eBooks is essentially a
sub-set of that project). It's worth noting that the bookstore's URL is tied
to the books.google.com site itself as a sub-directory of that site (see
http://books.google.com/ebooks). The user can reach his or her own library,
as built up since the launch of Google Books in 2004, by clicking either on
a small link in the upper right hand corner of his or her screen monitor or
on the slightly larger link that appears at the bottom of the bookstore's
home page.

 

 The same sales pitch indicates that the upgraded Google reader offers a
two-page reading mode, the option to search inside the book, user
customization, free sample chapters, and an "About This Book" page. The
entry included a link to a sample title displayed in the new HTML5 reader so
that new users could see the "full-featured" interface and better understand
the nature of the reading experience. As with so many product launches at
Google, a 2-minute introductory video was provided (see:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/discover-more-than-3-million-google.h
tml).

 

There are two ways of entering the new Google Books environment  - one is a
search box on the left that is described as allowing you to search "the
latest index of the world's books" and the other (on the right of the
screen) is a invitation to "Shop in the Bookstore Now" by clicking on
Google's branded bright blue button. The former has links to the user's
library as well as to a browsable interface (essentially the familiar
interface to Google Books), while the latter urges the user to shop for
titles that can be read on the Web, Android, iPhone, iPad, Sony and Nook.
Clicking on that button takes the user into a shopping interface which is
arguably more attractive (and less cluttered) than Amazon's.

 

How does the user know what is available? Cover art displays over two-thirds
of the screen, but in a lower-left hand navigational space (you may have to
scroll), there is a traditional set of subject classifications. 

 

Kindle users might naturally expect that where a Kindle edition is
available, there will also be a Google edition available. This is not
necessarily the case. Checking against my personal Kindle book collection, I
noted that Chris Anderson's Free as well as Simon Winchester's The Professor
and the Mad Man were two highly visible titles unavailable in electronic
form on Google.  Where both Kindle edition (KE) and Google eBook edition
(GE) do exist, the pricing is comparable: 

 

Groundswell                           GE $9.88                    KE $9.99

The Bible: A Biography         GE $8.00                    KE $7.79

Dreaming in Code                  GE $9.99                    KE $8.43

Wikinomics                            GE $9.99                    KE $9.99

Jane Austen in Hollywood    GE 13.20                     KE $13.20

 

Those titles are randomly chosen from my own collection at Google Books, but
they are also titles that have been included as required texts on various
college syllabi in recent years.  

 

The user gains access to a title by pressing the "Get It Now" button. If the
title is a current one for which payment must be made, that process is
handled through the Google Check-out service. The reader is then taken to
the book's page where he or she must click through a second time using a
button, "Read the Book." (Note: There will be three clicks before the user's
reading experience actually can begin). Once the user has gained the right
to access a title, the title is then transferred to the user's "Google
ebooks shelf," regardless of whether it is in or out of copyright.  Clicking
on the book's cover vaults the reader into one of two reading interfaces.  

 

The alternative options to the "Get It Now" button are (a) View Sample and
(b) Read on Your Device. If the user opts to view a sample in this context,
he or she is vaulted into the older Google interface to view the scanned
pages as a default. The option of reading on one's own device takes the user
to a page of apps for reading on alternate devices, just as Amazon offers
various options for reading Kindle editions. Android and web access is
immediate and Apple devices (iPad, iPod Touch and the iPhone) have approved
apps available to the reader. (Note: These are not apps necessarily offering
a seamless experience. If one needs help with the app while using it, the
help page the user sees refers the individual to a URL. Not a live link,
just a URL delivered as part of the text). At the time of this writing,
users with either Sony or Barnes & Noble devices were guided to Google Help
pages with instructions for the appropriate handling of a digital file. 

 

As previously mentioned, if the user selects the "Get it Free" button for a
public domain title in the bookstore, there's still an additional step to go
through. That button takes the user to an extended "About This Book" page
and only by clicking on a "Read it Now" button is the user finally taken to
the text of his or her selection. As an aside, the older "About this Book"
page prominently showed which Google-partnered library had supplied the
physical volume for scanning; in this new environment, that tidbit of
information which would have continued to give the Harvard or Oxford
University collections legitimate visibility is now buried at the foot of
the page with other mundane bibliographic data.

 

If the user chooses to read the text in flowable text, that option may be
selected though a settings button governing the size of type, the preferred
font, the text size, line spacing and ragged or right justified margins.
Those options naturally disappear from view if the user sticks to the
default of scanned pages. While it appears that the older Google reader
interface is primarily being used for any scanned title previews and initial
access to Full View titles, the new reader interface is intended to operate
in any Java-enabled web browser. The deciding factor of which interface the
user will see for reading a sample in the new viewer (insofar as I can tell
through use) is whether the publisher has allowed Google to display a
preview solely in PDF file format (in which case the user sees the older
interface) or whether the publisher is permitting Google to display the
preview in flowable text. The problem with this is that an ordinary user has
no idea about such a nuance and therefore is likely to be thrown into
confusion when different interfaces display for different titles while the
user is shopping during a single session in the eBookstore.  Additional
confusion may derive from the fact that within the newer interface, the tool
bar sometimes appears on the left of the screen and at other times in the
upper right of the screen. 

 

To further complicate matters, Google will sometimes put a message next to a
title's Buy button that says "Better for Larger Screen." That message is
supposed to convey to the user that only a PDF file of scanned images is
available for purchase. The casual user who purchases an e-book without
noting that message for reading on an iPod Touch is doubly out of luck. Not
only can s/he not read the title on the device of choice, but neither can
that title be deleted from the user's iTouch device. There is no mechanism
in Google Books for deleting titles from one's library in either the mobile
app or the browser-based environment of the desktop. Google's usage data
likely suggests to them that users don't differentiate well between PDF and
ePub so they've dropped that terminology. 

 

It's that kind of information architecture that makes the Google eBookstore
an incredibly irritating environment. It's Google Books.but then again, it's
really not. 

 

Another disconcerting aspect to the Google ebookstore experience is that
once the user is inside it, there's no easy navigational path back to those
titles in the user's Google Books library - the interface used in Google
Books since its launch. I can actually only navigate within the Bookstore to
the shelf designated for Google ebooks. Nor can a user reading a free book
in the older interface readily navigate into the Bookstore. The two venues
are attached by a minimal number of navigational paths. It seems clear that
Google is trying to gently push long-established users of Google Books into
the newer environment without alerting them to that fact.  One librarian of
my acquaintance indicated that one could navigate via parsing of the
Bookstore's URL (http://books.google.com/ebooks) -- removing the "e" from
ebooks - but such a clumsy option seems sadly out of keeping with Google's
famous principle of "Put the user first." 

 

The associated mobile application for the iPod Touch is as bare-boned as its
Web-based antecedent. Competing as it must against myriad sophisticated
reading apps, Google was wise to make this mirror-image interface
downloadable at no cost. While it presents no problems to a novice user,
neither does it meet the level of complexity that other reader interfaces
for that environment have. As just one example, the recently released
Bluefire Reader application (http://www.bluefirereader.com/ ) created as a
white label e-reader interface allows bookmarking where Google's
iPhone/iTouch app does not. 

 

User expectations for Google eBooks had been quite high. When
20thingsilearned.com launched with a text about the Internet and browsers,
coming as it did from the Google Chrome team
(http://www.20thingsilearned.com/), more than one commenter thought the book
interface there presaged the finished Google Reader.

 

Other than the initial buzz during the 24 hours following the launch of the
Google eBookstore, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the
service. Like me, information professional Barbara Fister was less than
enamoured of Google Books as she indicated, blogging for Inside Higher Ed
(see:
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library_babel_fish/the_illusion_of_googl
e_s_limitless_library).

 

On December 9th, Elsevier issued a press release indicating that they were
participating in the Google eBookstore, although not all book titles from
Elsevier will be made available there. According to the press release, which
titles will be sold there will ultimately be decided on a case-by-case
basis. Individual titles from Elsevier are already available on the Kindle
platform and have been since the device's launch in 2007 (see:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_01
785).  

 

New reading interfaces and related ebook management applications have been
proliferating madly. Blio (a dramatic disappointment at
http://www.blio.com/) and the far-more promising Monocle
(http://monocle.inventivelabs.com.au/) are two that spring to mind. The
Internet Archive's Open Library launched a truly impressive reader interface
(http://blog.openlibrary.org/2010/12/09/new-bookreader/). Written up in
Salon was Eucalyptus as a particularly strong entry in the mobile arena of
e-reader software (see:
http://mobile.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/12/07/google_ebookstore/inde
x.html). I assure you that it's worth the $9.99 charged in iTunes. 

 

Mobile applications (and I count 14 reading apps on my personal iTouch) are
as sophisticated as the Web-based environments. Options for customization
foster a user's sense that the reading experience can be tailored to the
most particular tastes. Font and background colors are the least of it. As
an example, one system offers the option of opening footnote hyperlinks in a
pop-up window, in the same window, or in a split window. The same software
allows the user to set his or her preference for swiping pages left to right
(scrolling) or up and down (flicking). The Mantis Bible Study Software
(currently version 4.9.2) permits a user to assemble a customized study
experience, contextualizing a particular biblical text through in-line links
to both dictionaries and other reference and scholarly content purchased
through their store.

 

Various social reading environments have sprung up. Figment - intended for
young adult readers - attracted some 4,000 new members the day it launched
(http://figment.com/). Barnes and Noble's NookStudy, a downloadable reader
interface for college students in support of rentable textbooks, features a
social element for study groups as well as the option of actually printing
pages from their scanned texts. It was received with mixed reviews - the
negative (see:
http://www.publicstatic.net/2010/10/14/nookstudy-not-so-great-for-studying/)
and the enthusiastic (see: http://blog.ecollege.com/WordPress/?p=478).
Copia, originally focused on low-cost dedicated e-readers, transferred their
attention to the creation of an electronic bookstore with an associated
social network (see Mashable's write-up at
http://mashable.com/2010/11/22/copia-public-beta/]). Even Mendeley for
scholars is viewed as a social reading environment as Eric Hellman pointed
out, writing on the rise of social reading environments and how this
potentially alters business models as much as it shapes reading patterns and
expectations (see:
http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2010/12/biblio-social-objects-copia-mendel
ey.html). 

 

This being the case, is Google simply indifferent to the competition offered
by sophisticated reading software available elsewhere? Their Google Books
experience lacks engagement. Or is it that Google foresees changes so
dramatic ahead of us in terms of content delivery that they feel the effort
required to create a more compelling reading experience a poor use of
organizational resources? And what does that mean for traditional
information providers serving the library community?  

 

Want to learn more about portable devices and the e-reading experience? Look
for the NFAIS webinar on this topic to be held early next year.

 

Also, early bird registration discounts for the 2011 NFAIS Annual conference
end on January 7th.  Until then savings of up to $100 off the full
registration fee are available and NFAIS members registering three or more
staff at the same time receive even greater savings (for details see the
registration form at
http://nfais.brightegg.com/page/295-register-for-2011-annual-conference).

 

2010 SPONSORS

Accessible Archives, Inc.

American Psychological Association/PsycINFO

The British Library

CAS

Copyright Clearance Center

CrossRef

Data Conversion Laboratory

Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)

Getty Research Institute

H. W. Wilson

Information Today, Inc.

Office of Scientific & Technical Information, DOE

Philosopher's Information Center

ProQuest

Really Strategies, Inc.

Temis, Inc.

Thomson Reuters Healthcare & Science

Thomson Reuters IP Solutions

Unlimited Priorities Corporation

 

 

************************************

 

 

Jill O'Neill

Director, Planning & Communication

NFAIS

(v) 215-893-1561

(email) jilloneill at nfais.org

 

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