RSSGoogle to Sell Digital Books Online
By Nate Mook | Published March 13, 2006, 1:48 PM
Google is inviting publishers in the United States and Britain to submit their books for sale online, and even set prices that the search engine would charge customers. The move is an expansion of Google's Book Search project, which has been the subject of much controversy.
The program currently makes available a few sentences from digitized books, only allowing full text access to titles out of copyright. But soon consumers will be able to buy books for viewing within their Web browser; copying and printing will be prevented. Google has not said when it plans to launch the new feature.
PDF has many security features and includes the capability to incorporate javascript, so I suppose a combination of encryption and JS could make books hard or impossible to share. But if they lock it down as hard as MS did with their eBook reader, I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. I bought a legitimate eBook a few years back and had such trouble with the constant logging-in and endless hassle of trying to get the text in front of me after an endless and constantly repeated round of security checks, that I just found it on P2P instead in plain format - print, read, copy, paste - bliss.
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Why? Why? Why?
Whatever happened to their montra "Do one thing and do it well."?
Google is the Devil!
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its not that they aren't doing one thing anymore. they are a search engine formost and an ad company upmost. they need content to sell and to advertise, they are merely expanding their reach.
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hopefully pdf, and in a format blind users can read. Good for google, anyway.
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What format I wonder? PDF? Or perhaps a new proprietary format? (Hopefully not.)
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Of course not, they would never repeat the same thing they did with their video...
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audio books would be cool. esp. if they could be streamed to your car. might make long trips to places less boring.
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