I’d forecast that end 2009 would see an all-out war between Amazon and Google over books. Google just took the first big shot, well ahead of schedule -
Google has made all 1.5 million public domain books it has, available for phones for free via Google Book Search Mobile.
It should work on all iPhones and all Android Phones. Note that these books were already available for free via Google Book Search as images of the book pages. To enable these books for mobile Google had to use Optical Character Recognition – somewhat akin to handwriting recognition.
I find it hilarious that the people at Google’s Google Book Search blog are making such a big deal about OCR (optical character recognition) and calling it a daunting task. We live in a world of cloning and quantum computers so being able to recognize printed words shouldn’t be all that difficult.
What is Amazon up to?
Amazon is making its own moves – Paul Biba at TeleRead points out that Cornell University has added 80,000 books to Amazon’s print to read program.
So Amazon is in many ways – with its Browse Inside the Book feature, with partnerships, with Print on Demand, with the Kindle, building up its own answer to Google’s scanned books threat.
An even bigger War than Books?
If we think of all purchases in terms of three critical steps i.e.
- Starting Points i.e. where people begin their purchase journey.
- Decision Points i.e. where people do their research and get data and make their decision.
- End Points i.e. where people make their actual purchase.
Google has monopolized Starting Points. Amazon on the other hand is working towards monopolizing End Points.
Google = Search. Amazon = Buy.
Google and Amazon are fundamentally enemies – unless they merge they will always be fighting each other because they control different parts of the purchase chain. I’d actually rather be in Amazon’s position because the End Points always make money, and End Points are much harder to displace than starting points.
Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | amazon vs google
Len, the OCR stuff is ‘daunting’ in that they have to a human go through to correct all the misreadings even with the best OCR systems. It’s labor intensive.
Too bad another human didn’t go over my note first
Len? You mean abhi.
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Yes !
I realized later that it was abhi, rather than Len but didn’t want to send yet another note. Thanks!
Anyway, even 1% in errors on OCR’g a book makes quite a bit of human labor needed.
abhi,
Check out this report on the difficulty even now of doing OCR work on all those books.
It would appear no human is proof-reading some (or even most of those).
http://iphonetouch.blorge.com/2009/02/09/google-book-search-goes-mobile-and-is-tested/
It’s pretty funny!
BUT it would appear that it is Apple’s fault in converting the google book results to its own small screen.
The error rate for OCR is typically significantly less than 1%.
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