“The ultimate effect of Google eBooks, if Google knows what’s good for it, will be the creation of an ad-supported publishing model,” says blogger James McQuivey of Forrester, the prestigious technology and market research company. That’s a pretty unequivocal statement, but McQuivey is as certain about it as he is that there are two O’s in Google.

He knows he’s playing with fire, too, because if there is one article of faith that authors swear by it’s NO ADS IN MY BOOK! But he’s done his homework, and it looks like authors may have to start swearing by the next article of faith on their list, because McQuivey has marshaled some pretty persuasive arguments:

First, books are the only medium left not significantly sponsored by advertising. From the Android Angry Birds game app to Pandora music streams to Hulu.com to the venerable NYT.com, advertising is essential to the success of nearly all media — analog and digital. The only reason book advertising has not happened is that the economics of distributing books have required that people pay for them — in a way they have never paid for the newspaper, magazines, or even music, where a majority of listening has always been radio-based. If you make people pay the full price of a book’s creation and distribution, you can hardly expect them to endure advertising. Plus, books last for such a long time that an ad placed twenty five years ago in my copy of The Hunt For Red October would be laughably irrelevant today.

That has all changed now. Since Google intends to provide its books from the cloud, it can deliver ads that are timely and targeted. And the economics of publishing are swiftly moving away from an analog production model…which means that soon, we will no longer need to force the entire cost of a book on the buyer of the book, but instead can extract value from the reader of the book, in direct proportion to the value they get from it. In other words, the more pages they read (the more value they get), the more ads they see and the more value the publisher and author receive.

And that’s just his openers. “I have a hundred more justifications for why this is the next logical step for the industry, why Google is perfectly poised to do it,” he declares.

Are ads in e-books one of those laws of unexpected consequences? If you believe that you also believe there is only one O in Google.

Read Google eBooks Paves The Way For Ad-Supported Publishing, then start sketching the ad campaign for your Google eBook.

Richard Curtis

Google “biggest real estate deal of the year” and you won’t need to do an advanced search. Google now owns the vast building it has been renting for its 1800 New York City employees. How vast?  “At 2.9 million square feet, it has more space than the Empire State Building,” writes Charles V. Bagli of the New York Times, “and plenty of room for Google to grow.”

But as Google populates the space for its East Coast headquarters will it invite some tenants to find offices elsewhere?  Like e-book rival barnesandnoble.com? Among other tenants are Lifetime Entertainment, Nike USA and Deutsch advertising.

Details of the real estate deal in Google Signs Deal to Buy Manhattan Office Building

RC
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Attention Gmail users: Google owes you a settlement. Don’t look for it in your mailbox any time soon, though, because it’s not going to show up as a check.

It happens that a group of Gmail users took issue with the firm’s recently instituted social networking feature called Buzz.  In Buzz, users can place photos, videos, and comments in their inbox.  When the service was initiated many users complained that they were not clearly offered a choice to display the Buzz content, giving uninvited visitors access to private information. When Google recognized this unintended result it moved swiftly to modify the program.  But by then enough damage was perceived by some users to provoke the lawsuit. It has now been settled, and every Gmail user is a beneficiary of the settlement.

So – what do you have coming to you?  “Google,” says the company announcement, “has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.” If you don’t like the settlement you will have an opportunity to opt out of it. But don’t.  Take advantage of the offer.  Privacy is a more complex issue than you think, as Google, now $8.5 million poorer, has discovered.

Below is the full text of Google’s announcement.  And to refresh your memory, at the bottom of the page is a video tutorial about Buzz.

Richard Curtis

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Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year.

Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case.

The settlement acknowledges that we quickly changed the service to address users’ concerns. In addition, Google has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.

Just to be clear, this is not a settlement in which people who use Gmail can file to receive compensation. Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement, unless you personally decide to opt out before December 6, 2010. The Court will consider final approval of the agreement on January 31, 2011. This email is a summary of the settlement, and more detailed information and instructions approved by the court, including instructions about how to opt out, object, or comment, are available at http://www.BuzzClassAction.com.

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This mandatory announcement was sent to all Gmail users in the United States as part of a legal settlement and was authorized by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Google Inc. | 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway | Mountain View, CA 94043

Astrid Anderson Bear, recounting her frustrating efforts to fight piracy by using takedown notices (see Takedown Notices? Antipiracy Weapon or Exercise in Futility? Part 1), refers in passing to the “DMCA”.  The initials stand for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and because it is the bedrock law governing those takedown notices it’s important that every author understand it.  A recent lawsuit involving two titans of industry, Google and Viacom, exemplifies the issues.

It happens that YouTube, a division of Google, carried some film clips uploaded by customers, and it turned out that those clips belonged to Viacom. Upon receipt of Viacom’s complaint, YouTube took the offending content down. Nevertheless Viacom brought a $1 billion infringement claim against Google. Google claimed it had acted properly under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  The court supported Google’s position.

What exactly does the law say?

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), signed into law in October 1998 by President Bill Clinton, “criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works,” according to Wikipedia.

However, one provision of the Act provides a “safe harbor” for Internet Service Providers (like AOL or Yahoo) that carry infringing content. Under Title II, if an ISP is notified by a copyright owner that the ISP is carrying infringing or allegedly infringing content, and promptly removes or blocks access to that content, the ISP does not incur liability. By following the procedures prescribed by Title II of the Act, Google escaped liability.

That same safe harbor is accorded to websites that carry pirated e-books. Title II prescribes the arduous takedown procedure that aggrieved authors and publishers must follow. Infringers that ignore or defy that procedure may be subject to prosecution under DMCA.

But what happens if, after an infringer complies with a takedown notice, the material pops up again? Is the claimant helpless in what Ms. Bear describes as ” the whack-a-mole world of illegal downloads”? Here there is hope for the Astrid Bears of this world. Some lower-court decisions have ruled against websites that re-post infringing content after having been enjoined from doing so.

And what happens if a website doesn’t actually carry infringing content but links to websites that do, or links to software or websites that circumvent or disable DRM?  Again, there is protection for copyright owners from repeat offenders. Unfortunately, some aspects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have not been fully tested in the courts.

It may require a Viacom-sized plaintiff (or a Harlan Ellison) to put pirates out of business. Nevertheless, DMCA offers a potentially powerful legal tool for driving back some infringers.

For a detailed analysis you can read Peter Kafka’s report on the Google/Viacom case on the All Things Digital website.

Richard Curtis

For a complete archive of E-Reads postings on piracy, visit Pirate Central.

Google has  announced its first content partners for Google TV, which New York Times reporters Claire Cain Miller and Brian Stelter describe as the company’s ” effort to marry two mediums — the Internet and television.” That’s just great. But how about us book people? Where is Google Editions? What are we, chopped liver? The natives are getting restless for the launch, and who can blame them?

Self-styled Media Maverick Greg Sandoval, writing on CNet, asks Hey, what happened to Google Editions? . He points out that “if Google Editions doesn’t get off soon, doesn’t the store risk missing the holiday shopping season or falling further behind in an e-book sector filled with tough competitors, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Apple?”

Sandoval is right. Back in May, when spring was in refulgent blossom, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was to open its digital book store in late June or July. Five months later the leaves are falling but no Google Editions. Soon we will feel the chill breath of winter. Now folks are wondering if Google will even deliver by the end of the year.

To be fair, Google never announced a hard launch date, and that was smart. This is a company that takes pride in doing things right and doing them well, and they would rather risk frustrating the publishers that have signed up than go out prematurely.

Like our publisher colleagues we envision Editions as a potentially significant source of revenue. But we have a less obvious reason to see Editions launched and it has to do with the promise of reduced piracy. Since Google Editions will not be in the form of digital files transmitted across the Internet, but rather will be accessed in the so-called “Cloud” (a romantic way of saying stored on Google’s servers), it will be far harder for pirates to retrieve a Google Edition e-book.  They would have to hack into Google’s server bank. While that’s not impossible – China has already done it -  it will be difficult for casual hackers to steal the books.

At least we think so. But Teleread blogger Chris Meadows is skeptical.  “If there is a way for a computer to display data,” he writes, “there will be a way for the owner of that computer to access (and save) the data. It’s a truism of the Internet age—just look at all the YouTube stream rippers out there. It won’t take long for someone to make a Google Book ripper; the hackers out there will take it as a personal challenge.”

It’s hard to know until we see for ourselves.  So, Google?  When already? We chopped liver people want to know!

Richard Curtis

About a year ago we wondered: You can Google Bing But Will You Bing Google? The answer seems to be…kind of.  Microsoft’s search tool has grabbed a respectable 12.7% share of the search engine market.  But Bing is far from achieving the most important branding benchmark of all: becoming a verb.

By that criterion there is only one branded search engine.  We still google information with a lower case “g”.  But we don’t bing with a lower case “b”. Until “to bing” joins “to Xerox”, “to TiVo”, and “to Madoff” in the short list of iconic names that have entered the grammatical pantheon, it will never be more than just another face in the lineup.

That said, Claire Cain Miller and Ashlee Vance report in the New York Times that Google is getting a little nervous about some of Bing’s innovations. “While no one argues that Google’s dominance is in immediate jeopardy,” Miller and Vance write, “Google is watching Microsoft closely, mimicking some of Bing’s innovations — like its travel search engine, its ability to tie more tools to social networking sites and its image search — or buying start-ups to help it do so in the future.

“Google has even taken on some of Bing’s distinctive look, like giving people the option of a Bing-like colorful background, and the placement of navigation tools on the left-hand side of the page.

“The result is a renaissance in search, resulting in more sophisticated tools for consumers who want richer answers to complex questions than the standard litany of blue links.”

Details in Bing and Google in a Race for Search Features

Richard Curtis

Remember when IBM pitted its Deep Blue computer in a chess match against human opponents? Well now, HotHardware reports that IBM has developed a “Question Answering” supercomputer that not only answers questions put to it in plain English, but is good enough to play Jeopardy.

The machine is named “Watson” after IBM’s founder but perhaps a play on Dr. Watson, whose questions to his companion Sherlock Holmes invariably elicited the reply, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” And don’t forget Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant Watson, who was summoned by Bell on the freshly invented telephone to see if it worked. It worked.

Though it sounds like a multimillion dollar parlor trick, in fact IBM has set its sights on no less a rival than Google. Its ability to answer questions in conversational English give it the advantage over the Google keyboard.

And responding to Jeopardy questions is particularly challenging.  Watson needed to be “trained” to recognize those questions, which are really answers.  And, as the video shows, Jeopardy’s format is filled with puns and other wordplay, requiring a nimble intellect.

HotHardware points out that Watson passed some tests with flying colors, but it still has a way to go before it puts Google out of business.  “Watson has a tendency to crash [and] sometimes goes on streaks of getting everything wrong.”

Well, yes, that can be a problem!

Richard Curtis

Think you’re addicted to YouTube now?  Your fifteen minutes a day – maybe five or six videos of two or three minutes each – are a fraction of the five hours you spend daily watching television. Google, YouTube’s owner, is not happy about that and has plans to raise your dose substantially.

Dude, when YouTube is through with you you’re gonna be freebasing videos.

You probably haven’t been aware of it, but right now you have too much choice.  When you go on the YouTube website you make choices about what you want to watch.  When you finish watching a video you have the choice to select another or to exit the website.  YouTube doesn’t care for choice one little bit. “Every decision point is an opportunity to leave,” says a company executive, and opportunities to leave are not good for business. Not good at all.

Randall Stross, writing in the “Digital Domain” feature of the Sunday New York Times, says that YouTube has devised a strategy to capture your attention to keep your eye on the screen and your hand off the exit key. “This fall,” writes Stross, “YouTube says it will introduce a radically different, uncluttered look, with YouTube Leanback. It will have a separate Web address and will start playing a video the moment a user clicks on the site. When one video ends, another will start automatically, eliminating those dreaded ‘decision points’ that invite abandonment.”

But there’s more – hours and hours more.  Stross reports that the chief of YouTube’s user experience team – yes that’s actually a title -  says the site is stepping up its long-form content – “television shows, professionally produced Webisodes and movies, as well as live sporting and music events.”

Prepare to trade in your couch for…another couch, compliments of YouTube.

Read details in YouTube Wants You to Sit and Stay Awhile.

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Last year we posed this question to bloggers: Would you be happy with 100 million visitors and 5 billion hits a month on your website – if you were losing $40 million a month to service them? That’s the question that Google has been asking itself; the hemorrhaging website in question is Google’s corporate subsidiary, YouTube. The very amateurism that had made YouTube the Fabulous Behemoth was draining its resources.

Google realized it was time to stop giving content away and to recognize that it is an entertainment medium that has every right to monetize that content. In short, Google had to go Hollywood, with professionally made videos generating advertising revenue.

The New York Times‘s Brad Stone has looked in on YouTube and found its strategy beginning to take grip. That seems like a good idea given the fact that it attracts more than 2 billion views daily.

Stone writes that “Google executives said in January that the site, which has perennially lost money, had increased its revenue, and that ad space on YouTube’s home pages for 20 countries was sold out every day toward the end of 2009. Many analysts say YouTube could break even this year for the first time, after five years of large losses generated by its high bandwidth and storage costs.”

To learn how you can monetize your website when it attracts 60 billion views every month – or even a mere 6 billion – read At YouTube, Adolescence Begins at 5.

Of course, not all of us are happy to see YouTube go Hollywood.  Last year we wrote:

How do we feel about the westcoastification of YouTube? Here’s one opinion – mine:

Well, Hollywood, there are millions of us who don’t want YouTube to mature. We like it just the way it is — embarrassingly sophomoric, amateurish, LOL hilarious, pathetic, dopey, dirty, funky, and utterly counterculture. It belongs to We the People. Can’t you go co-opt some other industry? We can think of a lot of them that could use your genius, your money and your values.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

“America’s dairy farmers could soon find themselves in the computer business, with the manure from their cows possibly powering the vast data centers of companies like Google and Microsoft.” writes Ashlee Vance in the New York Times.

“The rise of higher-speed data transfer networks, however, has given technology companies a chance to move farther from large populations and still be able to get information to them as quickly as they need it. So companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com and Microsoft have been engaged in a mad dash to find spots in the United States that have plenty of electricity and land. As a result, more data centers have been built in states like Washington, Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma. If those locations are near dairy farms, so much the better.”

Are we missing a bet by not setting one up in Washington DC?

Details in One Moos and One Hums, but They Could Help Power Google

RC