I was tempted to start this post with ‘And so it begins . . .’, but that would be wrong. Because Google’s leviathan-like surfacing in the book market has been a long time coming. Google Editions, the company’s new online bookstore, is due to start selling this summer.
I have mixed feelings about Google’s strategy. On one hand, I’ve had to admire their ‘Shock and Awe’ approach to getting the publishing world online. Publishers have been tentatively dipping their toes in those digital waters, terrified of what it might mean for their business. And then Google has come along with a water cannon to encourage everyone’s cooperation. Their Library Project has caused uproar in the publishing world, and now their ‘device-agnostic’ book service (unlike Amazon or Apple, they’re not locking their service to a single device) looks set to push ebooks quickly into the mainstream. It won’t be long before they’re selling print editions, audio-books etc.
It’s all part of their master plan to ‘put all of the world’s information on the web’ – making it available through applications such as their search engine of course. They are also keen enthusiasts of ‘cloud-computing’ which, for those who don’t know, means you do all of your computing on the web. You pay a subscription and get access to online resources such as applications and storage, so you don’t have to buy the software or the hard drive space yourself. I can see the advantages, but I like having my stuff on my hard drive in my house, instead of having it on someone else’s computer where I can only reach it with a web connection. 
But things are already heading in that direction, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, things in publishing might have to move that way too.
On a loosely related note, I received my copies of the first two Armouron books, ‘The Armoured Ghost’ and ‘Lying Eyes’, last week. The picture shows my daughter sorting through the box and giving me her opinion on their taste, colour, texture and tearability. The stories are set in a world where one company (the Perfect Corporation) attempts, among other things, to achieve complete control of the Earth’s information network.
No connection there at all . . .
