Category Archives: Google

We’ve had major interest in our upcoming webinar on the Google Book Settlement and unprecedented downloads of the related white paper, Google’s Settlement with the Publishing Industry: Opportunites and Strategies for Publishers, written by Bill Rosenblatt of Giant Steps Media and available for download without giving contact details here.

Given all the interest, I thought I’d share a list of what I consider the top resources for helping publishers and other information industry stakeholders understand the Google Book Settlement, its implications, and the opportunities and threats associated with it.

• The Google Book Settlement microsite, which includes the full settlement in HTML or PDF format. Note that the full settlement consists of 16 documents with about 320 pages of text, hence explaining the need for summarization and analysis.

• A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement, produced by the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries and written by Jonathan Band, JD.

• The Google Settlement: From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore, a blog post by University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, Paul Courant.

• Google’s Settlement with the Publishing Industry: Opportunites and Strategies for Publishers, the white paper by Bill Rosenblatt, mentioned above.

• Harvard professor Robert Darnton’s article Google and the Future of Books in the New York Review of Books along with a responding letter to the editor by Paul Courant et alia.

• Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig’s post, entitled On the Google Book Search Agreement.

• Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything, whose wrote My Initial Take on the Google-Publishers Settlement.

• Google Book Search Settlement: A Reader’s Guide by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• How to Improve the Google Book Search Settlement (draft) by James Grimmelmann of New York Law School.

• Perspective: The Google Book Search Settlement by Walt Crawford of Cites and Insights

• The Press FAQ from The Author’s Guild.

I should also note that Columbia Law School is holding a high-firepower, one-day conference on March 13, 2009 entitled The Google Books Settlement: What Will It Mean for the Long Term?

Finally, for those more inclined to click through a presentation than surf through the above links, below please find this excellent 69-slide summary by librarian Lauren Pressley.

If you know of other excellent resources (not just yet-another-summary articles) please share them with me by mail or blog comment, and I will attempt to update this post to add them.

(Thanks to Jill O’Neill at NFAIS for pointing to me to some of the links I added in the second revision of this post.)

I’m happy to announce the availability of a white paper on which we worked with information industry veteran Bill Rosenblatt of Giant Steps Media that analyzes the effects of the Google settlement with publishers, and identifies new opportunities that result from it.

From the introduction:

The first part of this white paper describes the Settlement Agreement in the litigation, including the Book Rights Registry, the initial set of business models that Google and publishers will implement, and the set of business models that the Settlement Agreement contemplates in the future.

The second part discusses the future opportunities for publishers, particularly those that depend on publishers’ ability to build XML-based content architectures and make content available in structured formats with standardized metadata. It then discusses the capabilities that will be necessary for publishers to adopt in order to take advantage of these opportunities, including systems, tools, processes, and standards adoption where appropriate. Of course, a growing number of publishers are already starting to adopt these capabilities.

From the start of the second section:

The future business models contemplated in Section 4.7 of the Settlement Agreement differ qualitatively from the way that Google currently works with publishers – mainly in that they include several opportunities that require the availability of content in structural rather than page-oriented formats.

I believe the agreement enables Google to challenge Amazon in the sale of online books (and importantly, derivatives thereof) and therefore that publishers need to think of Google not as only a discoverability channel, but also a distribution channel — and ergo be ready to distribute their content in the way(s) that Google asks.

To me, this unsurprisingly suggests the need to store content in a centralized XML repository whereby it can quickly be repurposed, reformatted, and/or otherwise sliced-and-diced to enable experimentation about new and different ways to sell it.

John Kreisa from Mark Logic presented on the settlement with Bill Rosenblatt at last week’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference and here is an article in Publisher’s Weekly about the panel. The slides that they presented are below:

Bill Rosenblatt has blogged about the white paper and about the settlement itself on his Copyright and Technology blog.

You can download the white paper via the Mark Logic site (and be asked to provide some information) here. Or you can use the back door and download the paper directly via the Giant Steps site, here.

As the bloom comes off the Google rose, you can now see the flip side of many of their once-sacred practices, such as their interviewing process and academic elitism.

While I’m not a Google fan — for the record, I always hated “don’t be evil” — nor am I a detractor. My biggest problem with Google is the seeming lack of self-awareness of many of its employees. I’m not opposed to Google-isms; in fact, I agree violently with some of them (e.g., intelligence matters in software).

I’m sharing this post mostly to balance the mainstream press which worshiped all Google practices as best ones when times were good, and then forgets to update us when the tide goes out and, as Warren Buffet once said, you can see who’s swimming naked.

I believe in strong culture and I know that Google has one. The trick, in my opinion, is looking out for the downside of a strong culture, because there always is one. The mails below help paint a picture of that downside.

My take on Google has always been

• One-trick pony
• Which has spent literally billions in experimental R&D — in an organic model that I like
• But has nothing to show for it

I remember once watching a panel of thirty-something, first-100-in, ex-Googlers rather condescendingly lecture about innovation best practices and thinking simply: despite literally billions in investment, you’ve never come up with a successful business innovation since the first two (search keyword and contextual ads) and, what’s worse, is you don’t even seem to know it. Then again, when world’s best business model is your first trick, it’s pretty hard to come up with a second one, and if you were in early enough, heck, you don’t need to.

But enough of my rambling. The purpose of this post was to link you to over to TechCrunch where you can see, in their own words, why Google employees quit.

A few excerpts:

As I was saying. Google actually celebrates its hiring process, as if its ruthless inefficiency and interminable duration were a sure proof of thoroughness, a badge of honor. Perhaps it is thorough. But I would be willing to wager that Microsoft’s hiring process, which takes a fraction of the time, does not result in a lower-skilled workforce or result in a higher rate of attrition. And let me say this: if Larry Page is still reviewing resumes, shareholders should organize a rebellion. That is a scandalous waste of time for someone at that level, and the fact that it’s “quirky” is no mitigation.

…

What was strange with me at Google was: while outside, I had all these big ideas I could do if I ever worked there. Once inside, you have 18,000 (at the time, Feb 2008) other googlers thinking the same things.

…

I wonder if post-Google bitterness is correlated to when you joined and/or how long you were at Google. It seems that it is. Maybe it’s the memories of Google in the first few years I was there that make it it seem magical, but I really do treasure the time I spent at Google. I left a few weeks ago, after almost 5 years at the company, because I wanted to pursue a markedly different career path. Sure, I had times when I was frustrated with the way Google was doing things, or when I felt that my particular project, or assignment was lacking, and I definitely had managers that I didn’t enjoy. But all in all — what a freakin’ amazing experience!

…

Google was my first job out of college. I was an English major at a prestigious college and was hired to work in HR. That is one of the problems I had with Google right there – is it really necessary to hire Ivy League graduates to process paperwork? I went from reading Derrida to processing “Status Change Request Forms” for X employees to go on paid leave. The term “Status Change Request Form” will forever haunt me.

…

Those of us who failed to thrive at Google are faced with some pretty serious questions about ourselves. Just seeing that other people ran into the same issues is a huge relief. Google is supposed to be some kind of Nirvana, so if you can’t be happy there how will you ever be happy? It’s supposed to be the ultimate font of technical resources, so if you can’t be productive there how will you ever be productive?

Check out Google Flu Trends, a site at Google.org, which uses Google flu-related searches as a predictor of flu activity, giving them what they estimate as a two-week advantage over the CDC’s US Influenza Sentinel Provider Surveillance Network.

The basic explanation of how it works is here. A scientific article on the project, which is to be published by the leading journal (and Mark Logic customer) Nature, is here.

Autonomy and Google are at it again. Per this InformationWeek story:

For the second time in six months, Google has publicly challenged a white paper from enterprise search rival Autonomy, claiming the latest document contains “significant inaccuracies.”

For customers with demanding needs, the Google appliance lacks the necessary security and connectivity models,” Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, said in an emailed statement. “It is not possible to make successful high-end enterprise search solutions without mapped security and productized connectors to repositories.”

I’ve not yet had time to dig into the detail of this, so I’m sharing it more as a news item for now and will — if it proves interesting — come back with analysis later.

Google’s rebuttal is here on the Google Enterprise blog.

My free PR advice for Google is to avoid a spat and simply create a low-key white paper that responds to any claims they believe are incorrect. In my experience, in PR wars the big guy never wins. Sometimes the little guy wins. Sometimes both companies lose. So when you’re the leader the best strategy is not to fight. Much as you want to.