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Books Revealed: How
Amazon's Full Text Search will Place eBooks in the
Limelight |
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3 November
2003 |
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With online retailer Amazon's
implementation of online text searching for more than
120,000 book titles, the stage has been set for eBooks to
come into their own. The new ease with which one can
determine whether a given book is valuable for a specific
need will only heighten the demand to have that value
recognized as soon as possible and with usage as flexible
as today's online users have experienced with online
content for years. The stage is set for a new era in book
selling, but it's far from clear that publishers are ready
to meet the challenge. |
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While thought of primarily as an
ecommerce company, the label hardly does
Amazon
justice. Amazon was one of the first companies to understand
that Web technology could be bent and shaped to provide a
service experience to people that was not only an efficient
simulation of "brick" outlets, but in fact one that tried to
leverage the unique capabilities of Web technology to provide a
superior experience wherever possible. In effect, Amazon has
tried to create the electronic equivalent of a personal
shopping assistant more than an online department store,
looking at their online clients from their needs and interests
on in, rather than from the merchandise or business model on
out. Strictly speaking, Amazon is not an online store: it is an
online agent, one which many have chosen to trust for any
number of personalized needs.
Key to Amazon's success has been their
understanding of the importance of tuning search technology and
search results to the needs of its clients to make an informed
and valued purchase. In the realm of books and other types of
premium content, this has meant opening up content to
pre-purchase browsing, at first by providing images of covers,
back pages, and excerpts of text, and
now by providing search access to the complete text of over
120,000 book titles from major publishers. While text-level
book searching has huge implications to the book publishing
industry, it is interesting that, as with online music, this
revolutionary capability was thought of not by the content
marketing experts but by a company that was attuned most to
providing what people wanted in an online purchasing experience
for a profit. With online search nearing the marking of its
first decade, book publishers are being dragged at long last
into the recognition that content products are not what they
want them to be, but what the client wants them and needs them
to be. And what people want is the same efficiency for
selecting books that they have had with virtually other form of
content via search engines.
The conservative way in which the
previewing of text has been accomplished via Amazon - you get a
graphic image of a page that matches the search query, not a
text block - will hopefully help to quell copyright fanatics
enough to allow the industry to focus on the tremendous
benefits that book text searching offers publishers and
booksellers. The tendency of many modern bookstores to emulate
gift shops and coffee bars underlines the inadaptability of
most book retailers to the realities of their core product
lines in the face of electronic retailing. As Shore Senior
Analyst Jean Bedord notes in her new report on the eBooks
industry, "The
eBooks Marketplace: A New Evaluation", where traditional
book retailers have been trying to bring the coffee shop into
the bookstore, ecommerce outlets are now seeing that it's more
effective to bring the bookstore into the coffee shop - or any
other venue where people feel comfortable looking for content,
including campuses and corporations. So while the likes of
Barnes and Noble stock up on coffee table books and CDs for
aging "Boomers", companies like Amazon are chasing the
search-and-download crowd, an online purchasing community
trained on MP3 tracks and Google search results.
In the face of online-searchable book
text, it is clear that the time for eBooks has arrived. Books
in physical form will never disappear as products, based on
matters of convenience, persistence and status, but their
hallowed place has been based in large part on their isolation
from the pervasive realities of how content is being created,
packaged and integrated in a myriad of electronic contexts.
With the advent of book text searching, consumers, libraries
and professionals can now locate and view books for purchasing
within the same continuum of electronic content as they do most
other content sources. In such an
environment, downloading book content will be the preferred
method of acquisition whenever issues of legibility and utility
give electronic books an advantage. While copyright issues
based on previewing functions will continue to brew for some
time, the method in which Amazon has implemented its text
viewing facility is at least as innocuous as what a browser can
accomplish in a physical bookstore, and far more likely in the
end to acquaint a wide range of readers with an author's works
- and therefore make a larger audience more likely to find
their work valuable and purchasable. With
that value in mind, it is altogether in the interests of both
authors and publishers to draw the straightest line between
that perceived value and the process of content acquisition. In
this sense, think of eBooks not as a medium but as the most
efficient way to cash in on that highly ephemeral and fleeting
sense in the eye of the purchaser - content value. Once that
value has been established via an eBooks purchase, the
possibilities are endless as to how that value can be leveraged
and extended.
So whether they like it or not, book
publishers are about to undergo a transformation at least as
radical as that being experienced by the similarly brick-bound
music publishing industry. Fortunately for book publishers,
this transformation is being undertaken in an environment in
which digital rights management is no longer wishful thinking
but an increasingly integral component of content creation and
distribution. As long as there are strong incentives for
purchasers to play by the game, book publishers have a golden
opportunity to raise their business to a new level of
profitability. Leading publishers appear to be leaning on the
likes of Amazon to lead them into this technology-driven world
in as safe and controllable a manner as possible: no Napster
debacles, please. But the certain success of book text
searching is going to require book publishers to grasp the full
potential of eBooks publishing, a potential that extends at
least as far as online music extends beyond the staid CD
format. The post-printing book world has barely begun, and
promises so much, but it's a promise that will require far more
aggressiveness in attacking the content marketplace than most
book publishers have exhibited so far.
-
John Blossom
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