Publishers Lunch gets all digital on digitized digits
Category: Digital Publishing
Michael Cader this morning covers a few interesting topics in Publishers Lunch. First, he picks up an article from The Age on how stray fingers are making their way into Google scans. We'd heard complaints about the quality of the Google scans in the past. Google, meanwhile, claims they are getting better at it.Next he segues into coverage of the article on Google Books, noting that while there's not much new in that piece, this quote is worth thinking about:
Google's corporate philosophy is based on the model which brought them success: organizing and giving away other people's content, creating space for advertisements in the process. The enormous success Google found with that model in the search engine business spurred it to try and impose it in every arena. In the Google worldview, content is individually valueless. No one page is more important than the next; the value lies in the page view. And a page view is a page view, regardless of whether the page in question has a picture of a cat, a single link to another site, or the full text of Freakonomics. When all you're selling is ad space, the value shifts from the content to the viewer. And ultimately the content is valued at nothing.
On that note, Cader zooms over to Tim O'Reilly's blog post about how digital distribution really doesn't "suspend the law of gravity" in terms of accounting and finance - that selling digital products doesn't require any sort of quantum accounting.
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