Publishers arn’t going to like this: Google now lets internet users download and print classic books for free. It’s going further than Project Gutenberg that has for some time been offering free texts. Google Books offers users attractively formatted copies from the original imprint. To find printable books, use the “Full view books” option in the search. They come in PDF format.

A Google Books search gives users a number of options including “search inside”, “buy this book”, “find this book in a library”, “search for reviews”, “search for related web pages”. Now it has added a “download” button to some books such as Bibliomania.

University libraries at Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of California, are involved in the Google Books project. Publishers, however, are suing Google. Google’s defence is that although the public can search copyrighted texts online, they won’t be able to download and print them.

It’s not hard to imagine what Penguin Classics thinks about Google’s plans, but it would seem that there is not much the company could do to stop Google offering out-of-copyright works to the public. I can imagine calls coming soon from publishers to extend the length of the copyright term once again. This has already happened once after pressure from Disney to keep Micky Mouse under tabs. In most countries copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author.

The Economist is asking “Who killed the Newspaper?” – and perhaps only a little prematurely.

Unlike the book publishing industry, which seems to be doing fine for the moment, newspapers have undergone traumatic times as they’ve lost their share of the advertising market, down from 36% in 1995 to 30% in 2005 according to iMedia. It’s no mystery where the advertising revenues have gone: Google recently reported a 77% increase in earnings over the same period the previous year. Even worse, Craig’s List offers classifieds – a mainstay of newspaper revenues – for free – and few can compete with “free.” The biggest bright spot for newspapers is that visitor numbers to their online versions are growing fast.

In the UK, The Guardian has seen online revenues grow by about 50% a year, and its editor, Alan Rusbridger, has said he can see the time coming quite soon when they will outstrip print revenues. The Guardian even breaks news stories on the web, rather than holding onto them tightly for the morning edition. In response to the Economist’s gloomy story, Rusbridger said:

“I think the next few years are going to be very expensive for newspapers, there is no doubt there is a decline in circulation and there is a decline in advertising revenue because both are going to the web….

“They are also going to have to spend large sums of money investing in the web and new technology. I’m not convinced that everyone is going to make it.”

A big problem for newspapers is that online readers do not bring in the same revenues as commuters on the train. The Economist cites ratios ranging from 1 /10 to 1/100 for their comparative values. People tend to hop around the net, from one news-provider to another. There is also the danger that aggregators like Google News will grab revenues. Newspaper like the Guardian and The Telegraph have tried to tap the social media phenomenon with ambitious blog and podcast projects, giving readers full scope to participate and and therefore stay loyal to their sites.

Financial newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have tried subscription models, which may work for specialist content – but most people have come to expect news for free: It’s just another commodity. Another response is to beef up the print editions with things that don’t work well online – like features and human interest, which can be more original and unique than news. My impression is that UK newspapers are well ahead of their US counterparts here, especially at the top end of the market – but still it’s not enough to stop the rot.

All this adds up to a big effort by newspapers to follow the money online. Many now see the web as their future. Exbiblio is running rather counter the trend with its ideas to help publishers make paper more attractive, both to the newspaper owners and to readers. It certainly sounds like an attractive proposition to have hyperlinks on printed paper – but it has to be remembered that click-throughs bring in pennies, not mega-bucks like display ads.

Here’s an interesting thought:

Hyperwords™ allows you to interact with all the words on the web, not just links.

Sounds familiar? Exbiblio is making all text into potential hyperlinks. It goes about it in a different way from Hyperwords, but it’s interesting to see that others are thinking along the same lines.

Hyperwords comes as a free extension to the Firefox Browser. All you have to do is block some text on the webpage, and a menu presents you with a cornucopia of Web 2.0 options – Search, Email, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Amazon, ebay, Google Maps, blog… All these and more are available with just one click. What’s very nice is that you can use it to copy and paste text and a URL all in one go.

Many thanks to Francisco, a regular visitor to this blog, for pointing this out. Here’s a short YouTube video about Hyperwords.

O’Reilly are running a competition called Lauchpad at the Web 2.0 Conference. It’s a talent hunt for a great new company.

When I read about this, I wondered, is Exbiblio Web 2.0? or Web 3.0? – or perhaps Book 2.0?

Last year people were still debating the meaning of Web 2.0. I’m not sure that it’s any clearer yet, but I would plump for saying that the classic Web 2.0 company has a social media aspect to it – sharing, sifting, commenting, tagging, collaborating, and communicating at grass roots level.

Would anyone like to say if Exbiblio is a Web 2.0 company?

Tower Records – the mega-store music chain – has has filed for protection from its creditors for the second time in two years. It is, of course, a victim of digital downloading.

A few years back, when Amazon started to loom large, there were predictions that bricks and mortar book stores would go out of business – but so far plenty of people still like to turn paper pages before they buy. This seems to show that readers enjoy buying a physical product.

Now Amazon itself is threatened by the trend to go digital. The Economist predicts that Amazon is preparing to go into the download business. It might be too late to dominate music, but the field is still fairly open for video and, perhaps further off, for digital downloads of books.

Amazon is already involved in a new technology for book publishing. It owns a print-on- demand service called Booksurge. Currently this is an option for self-publishing authors, but Amazon hopes to sell its printing service to mainstream publishers.

Under the print-on-demand model, the author uploads a digital manuscript to Booksurge. A paper copy is printed from the digital file only when a customer buys one. It’s a reminder that these days paper books have their digital shadows sitting on the publisher’s computer. The gap between the two media is closer than we often remember.

Soon, a large online retailer, whether it’s Amazon, iTunes, or another business, will be a repository of digital books, video, and music. It’s only a short step to inter-mesh related products together into multimedia packages. You can envisage a digital book that, instead of an illustration, has a short video on the page. It’s possible that you might be reading this off an eye-friendly screen that you can fold into your pocket. But given that many people still love the aesthetics of physical paper, the vision becomes even more intriguing when one of the elements in the package is paper containing live hyperlinks.

The Staten Island Advance has some advice on what to buy for the coming new school year. Along side advanced index cards and a pillow that connects to your iPod, it mentions a clutch of smart pens.

• Leapfrog Fly Pentop Computer: No ordinary ball-point, this pen actually has a computer inside it. An optical scanner reads everything you write and can perform many functions. It can solve math problems, translate English words into another language, remind you of your daily schedule, and if you draw a piano, Leapfrog will let you play it. Circuit City, $99.99.
• Wizcom SuperPen Professional Handheld Scanner and Dictionary: Use your pen scanner as you read and study, scanning important information into the pen. Then later download it onto your computer to create study guides. It can store up to 1,000 pages of text. The pen also has built-in dictionaries and a thesaurus. The scanner can also turn text into speech. Staples, $199.99
• Logitech Digital Pen is an alternative to taking a laptop to class. The Logitech digital pen is used in conjunction with “smart paper” which was developed to interact with the pen. The pen records handwriting and sketches, and then will convert notes into computer text, storing up to 40 pages at a time. It looks like a regular pen and lasts eight hours before needing to be recharged. From www.amazon.com, $134.95.

Here’s a movie that Exbiblio folk should go and see – A Scanner Darkly
– staring an animated Keanu Reeves and told in the style of a “graphic novel” come to life. The critics describe it as “difficult” but that’s never been a word to put Exbiblio people off. The scanner in question sees into the heart and mind. Now there’s a challenge for the scanner pen mark II.

The cross-over technology with which the film was made might be of interest too. The Scotsman reports:

Scanner was shot as a live-action movie and then fed into a computer, whereupon artists digitally traced over some frames by hand, using an electronic pen tablet.

The lines between traditional and digital media are getting more blurred all the time.

Exbiblio’s other founder, – I say “other” because he is based in England and often less visible around Exbiblio than Martin – is Quentin Stafford-Fraser. I was nosing around his website when I came across this rather interesting piece of footage which dates from 1995 and grew out of his Ph.D. You will see it is all about training a video camera on a white board – or on a piece of paper for that matter – and writing commands which tell a computer what to do – print, for instance. It intrigues me, partly because of its nostalgic vintage feel, but also because I think you can detect a strand of the Exbiblio thinking here. The linking of the digital world to the printed or written world is a theme which continues to this day.

You may need the Quicktime plugin to watch the video.

I’m very pleased to see that Neville Hobson has picked our blog as one of his top ten cool sites of the moment. Just in case you are wondering, I don’t know Neville personally, but I do drop by his blog frequently and sometimes leave comments (but no bribes).

He’s put us in the company of 9 really cool sites indeed. I’ll pick out three that I think will go down particularly well with Exbiblio people. They chime in with the company’s obsession to create an ultra cool product that will do plenty of good in the world, perhaps best expressed by Claes-Fredrik recently.

Presentation Zen is by a former Apple employee. It’s much more than a design blog, and looks at all things presentational, including stand-ups in front of a conference hall. It fits in with Exbiblio’s mission to leave beauty in its wake. As I’ve mentioned before, Apple is much admired around the office. I recommend this post on the Steve Jobs style at doing Macworld summer presentations. He points you to one you might not have seen recently – the 1997 vintage.

Creating Passionate Users The name speaks for itself. Exbiblio’s hardware / software project is seeking out passionate users. Try reading code like a girl to see if that gets some office debate going.

The Institute for the Future’s Future Now. You’ll find plenty of wacky inventions here, for example the Synthetic Gecko suit that would help your window cleaner climb up the wall like Spiderman.

I speak to Noah the day after it has been decided – by mutual consent it seems – that he is to leave Exbiblio in a week’s time. His view is that the parting is for the best. His primary interest is in User Experience, and he is trying to get away from his earlier career writing code (previous to his Master’s Degree in Technical Communication). Exbiblio would now like him to concentrate on coding. The split seems inevitable, although rather sudden, at least by my European standards. He leaves on what he calls “generous” terms.

Noah doesn’t believe that Exbiblio has a strongly implemented process for product development, and that as a result, his User Experience skills cannot be fully utilized. But first I ask him to explain what User Experience is all about.

“It’s partly Demographic. Who do we believe the audience is? How much money are they willing to spend? What are the comparable tools that they are using? What are the tasks the users are trying to achieve? What are the problems we are solving for them? This is at a different level from asking what features they want – they don’t know what the choices are – but they can tell you what they want to get done in life. They won’t say that they need a scanner pen – but you can watch them work and how they collect quotations from various papers and draw conclusions from those observations.”

At the next stage of development, he sees User Experience as being central to the creation of an effective product experience – its features, interface, and flow – based on the information that has been gathered.

“To do the second half well requires good research from the first phase, as well as knowledge of fields as diverse as graphic design and cognitive psychology. All of these aspects contribute to the creation of a superior product,” he says.

I press Noah a little (It should be remembered that the brief of this blog is total transparency) and he admits to some frustration with the Exbiblio approach to product development, and the way that it rapidly changes its mind about who the early adopters of its technology will be.

“It’s reached the point where if you were to ask most of the development team who is our main audience, they may or may not be able to tell you. It’s an issue if you don’t know who it’s for, because you don’t know what their needs are. It doesn’t make it impossible to make a successful product, but I think it makes it more difficult.”

He believes that if Exbiblio went through a different sort of design process – asking more questions about the users and their problems before throwing resources at product development – there would be a continuing role for him at the company.

For a different view, see the post on this blog by Claes-Fredrik Mannby For Love of Product

After completing his degree in Physics in 1995 at Reed College, Noah worked for a year at a small company in Portland, Universal Algorithms: “Actually, there were some interesting parallels between that company and Exbiblio. They had a brilliant founder with strong ideas about how to do business. In that case his direction ultimately led, in my opinion, to squandering some amazing IP and opportunities.”

He followed his intuition and left Universal Algorithms to join another local start-up, Quando, which was eventually bought by Infoseek and Disney. He moved with the company to its new headquarters in Seattle. He had spent his time at Quando – which has a highly specialised search technology – working as a coder, but he says that he had been very aware of design for a long time. This led him to take his Master’s Degree at the University of Washington, where his thesis was entitled Generation of Complex Diagrams: How to Make Lasagna Instead of Spaghetti.

He came across Exbiblio at a jobs fair earlier this year, and was attracted by the company’s vision, its technology, and its approach to business. He joined in April and is leaving with warm feelings about the company .

“It’s a remarkable work environment. People seem pleased to be here. The character of company, its way of doing business, treating employees well, treating partners well, its environmental awareness, and the sort of people it attracts – all of that is remarkable in these days when most companies focus on this quarter’s returns, short term gains and stock market price. But perhaps it’s a little too much vision- guided. Perhaps if it more focused on ensuring success, there might be a different approach to the process. ”

On another occasion, Martin King (Exbiblio’s founder), has told me that experience suggests that the average start-up will part with one in three of its hires. He says it’s the normal course of events, and that there is no shame in it for either party.

On the way to the airport, I give Martin a brief idea of what Noah has said and remind him that he has the right of reply. He has his own views on the problem that Exbiblio is trying to solve, and on how to go about creating a product. His views will surely work their way onto the blog by one route way or another, sooner or later.