Talking Google Book Search and eReaders with Google’s Chief Technology Advocate

As you may have heard last week, Sony and Google came to an arrangement last week to have a half million or so public domain books from Google Book Search made available for free on the Sony Reader.  As Chicago Tech News has been following the Amazon vs. Sony eBook format wars, Google Book Search was on the agenda when I sat down with Google’s Chief Technology Advocate, Michael T. Jones, two days before the Sony announcement was made.

“The outcome is we want the books to be searchable and readable,” is how Jones defines Google’s mission in relation to digital books.

“Basically, we have old books and new books, just not 1930-1970 [roughly],” Jones explained to me before we got into the politics of eReader devices.  “Those are the ones where we’re still working through things like who do you get approval from when the publisher’s gone away?”

While it’s the older, public domain books that are part of the deal with Sony, it should be remembered that Google does have relationships with publishers for new books and just because they’re linking to place to buy a print copy now doesn’t mean they couldn’t leverage those existing publisher relationships into selling eBooks in the future, though that wasn’t a topic that Jones brought up.

When Wired covered the initial Google-Sony announcement, they talked about Google taking a “jab” at Sony.

Here’s what Jones had to say about eReaders:

“Google doesn’t have an opinion on whose e-reader is the best and most friendly.  It’s like we don’t have an opinion on whose display screens are the best to do Google web searches, right?  You can buy whatever you want.  I’d love to see all the books we’ve scanned in Google Book Search be available on the reader.  I would also love to see all the books, like if you could separate the iTunes music store from the iPod, then you would actually have half your customers.”

“Google’s experience has been the way to meet customers — users — where they want to be, is to put things everywhere and see what they use.  Not to decide for them, like I think this one and that one is where you should get music, and this one and this one are where you get your words.  We just put things out there and see what people like.  It seems that’s the best world, where you could buy the content from whoever you wanted, but you could display it on whatever device you happened to own.  That would obviously be a more logical world, especially now.”

“It’s not clear the people building Beta and VHS tapes had the technology to have the best of both worlds.  Long playing in the case of VHS, higher quality in the form of Beta, but with digital bytes it’s not really a technical issue whose reader can read that book.  It’s purely a marketing question.”

On the one hand, there’s a sentiment that Google doesn’t want to get involved in hardware choices and would like to consider themselves above marketing squabbles.  On the other hand, Kindle doesn’t necessarily let you display non-Amazon content.  The PDF support isn’t universal and they’re still going to charge you for e-mailing that PDF to the Kindle (which a fellow might compare to Best Buy selling you a DVD player and then charging you extra to play DVD’s you bought from Target).  It is just possible that Google and Amazon have a philosophical disagreement.

Right now, the sales numbers for eReaders are with Amazon and Sony.  Both companies are pushing their own formats, though Sony is flexible on importing material.  If an eReader not attached to a proprietary format starts picking up in sales, don’t be surprised if the theoretical upstart talks to Google. If this is a philosophical issue, and that may well be the case, a popular pure open source platform would likely sit better with Google and their vast library of digitized material.