Download Squad

When you go into a bricks and mortar bookstore, you can spend as much time as you like wandering from section to section, picking up books and reading a few pages before deciding what you want to buy. The online bookselling experience has been something very different. You generally have to know what you want or make your decision based on recommendations, descriptions, or judging a book by its cover (or a picture of the cover anyway).

Google has been scanning books and creating an online searchable index, much to the consternation of book publishers. But as Techdirt points out, it's not that these companies don't see value in scanning books and allowing users to read snippets of a publication before deciding to buy it. But rather than work with a company like Google, Harper Collins and Random House are creating their own databases.

The thing is, in that bricks and mortar bookstore, you don't care who publishes a book. They're all on the shelf, arranged by author or topic. I'd rather not buy books at all than have to visit a dozen different websites to find the books I'm looking for. I'd much rather be able to type a search term into Google or some other engine and have books from multiple publishers pop up. Movie studios and music labels get this, and have partnered with companies like Apple, Microsoft, MovieLink, and Amazon to make their content available side by side with their competitor's product. Why can't the gatekeepers of the oldest mass medium in the world figure this out?