The way books are bought and sold will at some point change if Google has anything to do with it. Dan Clancy, the engineering director of Google Books, recently talked about how he favors a model whereby texts are kept in the cloud.

Imagine this: you walk into a bookstore, buy the digital Google edition of a novel, and then are able to access the work from your cell phone, laptop, or home PC. Or maybe even someone else’s home PC, if you’re traveling and have some sort of way of proving your purchase history.

Neat, right? Clancy figures this is just as good as having a physical copy, so long as a big company’s backing the effort. According to E.B. Boyd, he reasoned, “For most people, your library is something that you don’t pull books off all that often, but when you need it, you want it to be there. That’s where a cloud really works. You’re not going to actively manage it, but you want to make sure that five years from now, [it's there].”

Clancy later continued, “So part of our model is to figure out we’re going to syndicate for our partner program all of the books we sell that are new, so that any bookstore can sell a Google edition and find a way that people can buy them in bricks and mortar stores . . .” Or online, of course.

Clancy didn’t give many clues about how far along this idea is. Still, given that Google’s got a market cap of $140 billion, it seems rather likely that the search giant will be able to make it become a reality.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 4:22 pm and is filed under digital. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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