Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 3:03 PM

This is a guest blog post written by Graham Waldon, manager of East West Bookstore, an independent bookseller based in Mountain View, California


People are more important than things. That motto lies at the heart of what we believe at East West Bookstore, lending a certain resonance to our partnership with Google and its philosophy of "focus on the user and all else will follow."

East West is not just a business. It is above all a resource for expansive ideas, a retreat from ordinary life, and a gathering place in support of community ideals and spiritual growth. True spirituality is always current, vibrant, and applicable to daily life, not something to be hidden away or buried in the depths of history. In that spirit, East West always strives to evolve and adapt to people's current needs. One of our fun new evolutions this past year has been our integration with Google to sell Google eBooks on our website.

Our partnership has given us a complete ebookstore, with a vast selection, so that as more and more people move to ebooks, we'll be there ready for them. Since we rely heavily (like all independent bookstores) on people who love helping to support us, we're glad we can offer them this way of doing so. And when you buy a Google eBook from us, you're supporting more than just East West. You're serving our whole community by supporting an important spiritual and cultural resource that is unique in the Bay Area.

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Monday, July 20, 2009 at 9:40 AM

Guest post by Chris Anderson, Author

My new book, FREE: The Future of a Radical Price, is about a counterintuitive notion: that you can make money by giving things away. Actually, it’s pretty surprising that is still controversial, given that it’s the foundation of the long-standing broadcast media model (radio and television are “free to air”, supported by advertising) to say nothing of the billions in profit made every year by my hosts here at Google. But Free is perhaps the most misunderstood four-letter word beginning with “F” in the English language, which is why I wrote a book about it. The debate the book has sparked is evidence of how polarizing and disruptive the concept still is.


Needless to say, a book called “FREE” should be free. Not necessarily free as in speech, but free as in beer: not libre, but gratis. It would be hypercritical, to say nothing of cowardly, to argue that you can make money by giving things away and not practice what I preach with my own book. But as readers of this blog know, the publishing industry does not yet operate on open source grounds, with authors making all the calls. So how and where to make the book free was a negotiation to be had with my publisher (Hyperion, a division of Disney) and retail partners, so that everyone felt they had the potential to benefit if the experiment was a success.

The basic business model of free books is “Freemium”, the combination of free and paid premium versions of a product. Meanwhile, the basic thesis of FREE is that since the marginal cost of bits is close to zero, smart companies should "round down" and use free as a form of marketing to reach the largest possible audience with free samples, ideally upselling potential customers on something else. In this case, it seemed clear that the “premium” form of the book is the physical book, in its atoms form.

As the editor of a dead-tree magazine, I’m often asked whether print is itself dead. It may be for newsprint, but some paper still adds value in an Internet age. What we do with the packaging of photography, design and long-form journalism in the paper version of Wired is still impossible to recreate in HTML, and I feel even more strongly about the physical charms of a hardcover book. As much as I love the convenience of the Kindle, it’s hard to beat the battery life, page resolution, portability, skimability, giftability and sheer shiny beauty of a well-made hardcover, as the bookshelves throughout our home testify. A physical book is an artifact, not just information. My very digital kids feel the same way: they may never read a printed newspaper, but they love physical books as much as I did when I was their age.

After studying what other authors had done with free digital books, my publisher and I decided to make FREE free in as many formats as possible to encourage sampling without competing too much with the premium hardcover. It's free on Google Books, Scribd, the Amazon Kindle (and Kindle iPhone app) and Shortcovers (these are time limited, from one week to one month). The full unabridged audiobook is free at iTunes, Audible.com and as downloadable MP3s at Wired.com (no time limits). Even the physical book will be free, in paperback form in the UK, thanks to deal by which Adobe brands and sponsors the book and BrandRepublic distributes it on request.

The aim of all this is to lower the barrier to entry to sampling the book. Our bet is that Free will expose the book to the largest possible audience, with the hope of converting a fraction of them to paying customers. Obviously, much depends on that sample being a positive experience (judge for yourself) and us being right that many people still value hardcover books as we do. But so far, the evidence seems to be positive. As I write this, a week after publication, about 100,000 people have read the digital book for free on Google Books and Scribd. And, this afternoon, I got word that the book would enter the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller list at #12 in its first week. Maybe, just maybe, Free worked!

Update from the Google Books team: After a one-month trial, Free is now in limited preview on Google Books. We will continue to partner with publishers and authors to explore new opportunities for promoting books on Google for free. Read the full post 0 comments

Wednesday, September 06, 2006 at 2:34 PM

Posted by Laura Driussi, Strategic Partner Manager

Good news for policymakers, researchers and others looking for key government documents. Recently, DIANE Publishing, which reprints a wide variety of government publications, made all of its titles in Google Book Search 100 percent viewable. While the Partner Program's default settings limit people to viewing 20 percent of any title, you're now free to read every page of every DIANE publication in the index. Explains Herman Baron, President of DIANE Publishing,

Our mission has always been to carefully select U.S. government reports and publish them to make it easier for readers to access this valuable information. Google Book Search provides a way for us to make these documents available to Google users worldwide. The free flow of government information to a democratic society is utmost in our mind. We're pleased to offer everything from the U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Policy and Strategy to a 1997 House committee hearing on Protecting the Future of Social Security to this GAO report on deterring the illegal diamond trade.

Feel like browsing? Try an advanced search by publisher to check out the other government reports DIANE has made fully viewable online. Read the full post 0 comments

Wednesday, July 19, 2006 at 3:46 PM

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

We’re always excited to hear about creative new ways authors and publishers are connecting with readers. NPR ran a story yesterday about how publishers like HarperCollins and Mira Books are creating live-action book trailers, showing these previews online and in movie theaters -- especially theaters located near bookstores. And a recent Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) describes how some fiction publishers are borrowing strategies from non-fiction marketing to reach niche audiences.

For instance, Ballantine Books distributed gift bags containing copies of James Swain thrillers -- which are set in casinos -- to hundreds of people at the World Gaming Protection Conference. Jennifer Chiaverini, author of the Elm Creek Quilts series, appeared on a cable TV quilting show to talk about patterns and her latest release. But she didn't stop with television -- she also created a website where she blogs about quilting, shares information about her books, publishes a schedule of her appearances and more.

Chiaverini isn't alone. So many people are talking about books online, there are sites like the LitBlog Co-Op, which aims to unite leading literary weblogs "for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace." MySpace, the popular social networking site, isn't only for teenagers or musicians. Reuters and PW Daily have profiled four memoirists who created The Memoirists Collective page, where the authors hold contests offering readers the chance to get their own memoirs published. As of today, the group has more than 1,000 friends. Now MySpace has a special section dedicated to books, authors and reading groups.

For some -- like author Cory Doctorow, who co-edits the BoingBoing blog, makes his books freely available online with Creative Commons licenses and podcasts installments of his stories -- connecting with readers online may already be second nature. But for others, it's something they're just beginning to tackle. Of course, we at Google hope that everyone who wants to help readers find their books online has a marketing plan that includes making the books discoverable through Google Book Search. Read the full post 0 comments

Thursday, June 29, 2006 at 2:42 PM

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

As I wrote in our debut post, this blog is about discovery. For a reader, that discovery might be a great book. For a publisher, it might be new audiences for previously obscure backlist titles. And for an author, it could be a new chapter in a budding career.

Susan Foote, a first-time author who joined the Google Book Search Partner Program last year, has an especially inspiring story to tell. In 1998, she set sail on a 41-foot sailing ketch to fulfill a lifelong dream: seeing the world by boat. The trip took her all the way from Lake Erie, Ohio to the shores of Opua, New Zealand. It also inspired her to write a book so she could share her experiences with people who dream of doing the same thing.

The book sold above expectations when it was first published in 2002. But three years later, after Foote decided to include it in Book Search, she had a wave of new orders, and started getting email from readers she wasn’t able to reach before. Says Foote in her Book Search success story:

I get letters from people telling me how happy they are to have found my book, and how it's made a big difference in their lives -- very often from older women. As I point out in my book, there are many books written by men who convinced their loves to go cruising, but few books written by the loves who did it. I'm happy to know that by writing about the second chapter in my life, I'm inspiring other women to start their own.

Very cool. If you’re an author or want to learn more about how the Partner Program works for authors, we invite you to visit our Author Resources page. Read the full post 0 comments

Friday, May 26, 2006 at 2:52 PM

Posted by Jen Grant, Product Marketing Manager

If you've ever wandered into a tiny bookshop in a quiet town, you've probably stumbled across a book published by Arcadia – a publisher that specializes in bringing to life the unique history of America's small towns. A partner in Google Book Search, Arcadia joined the program so people everywhere could discover books about places that hold personal meaning to them. Like the "small" town of Dorchester, Massachusetts – once an independent farming community, now a longstanding Irish-American enclave of Boston, passionately celebrated in song and affectionately referred to by locals as "Dot."

For us, Arcadia's success is exciting because it demonstrates what we hoped Google Book Search would enable: readers finding books they have a personal connection to, regardless of whether they have the opportunity to visit the local bookstore in "Dot" or anywhere else. Here's a video about Arcadia that we showed this past weekend at BookExpo America. Enjoy.

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Tuesday, May 16, 2006 at 11:58 AM

Posted by Jen Grant, Product Marketing Manager

Tim O'Reilly, the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, reported yesterday that his company has conducted a study indicating that by giving people greater access to O'Reilly books online (through Safari and Google Book Search), more potential book buyers are discovering older, out-of-print books -- something he says constitutes "compelling support for Chris Anderson's 'long tail' theory."

What's the long tail theory? The idea in the context of book publishing is that online exposure has the potential to capture what might otherwise be lost book sales. As The Economist puts it:

A real-world shop can only stock so many titles on its shelves, so it generally holds those most likely to sell, at the head of the curve: even the largest bookstore carries only around 130,000 titles. But an online store, with no limits on its shelf space, can offer a far wider range and open up new markets further down the long tail...Mr. Anderson's point is that collective demand for obscure items is very large, is growing, and can be aggregated over the internet, so that selling obscure books, music CDs or movies could prove to be just as lucrative as selling hits.

The O'Reilly study is interesting from our perspective because it suggests that Google Book Search helps publishers by helping users discover a wider range of books. O'Reilly observes that "only about 4% of all titles ever published are still being commercially exploited." The universe of books that can bring value to our lives is much, much larger than that. Already, we've been hearing inspiring stories from authors and publishers who've connected with new audiences, as well as "thank yous" from readers who've found books they would otherwise never have known existed. We hope to hear more of these stories as we make more of the vast universe of books discoverable online. Read the full post 0 comments