Next Steps for Google Books: More E-book Conversion and Retail?

Google has moved in two directions that will be critical for its bigger view of Google Books, and for book publishing in general. And the combination suggests that some deft strategy could leave the company as one of the most powerful players in the market.

First up, the announcements. Google makes two million scanned-in books available for life as on-demand paperbacks. A partnership with On Demand Books, which makes the Espresso Book Machine that offers on-demand automated book printing and binding while a consumer waits, means that many of the books that Google has scanned in, could be available at about two dozen locations around the world for anyone that wanted a printed version.

Also, Google acquires reCAPTCHA, which has technology that, as my BNET Media colleague David Weir noted, will not only help improve fraud and spam detection, but improve book and newspaper scanning by applying crowdsourcing to identifying words that computers can't.

Often such "deal" stories can really be a yawn, but there's some significant meat in both of these -- specifically, automated e-book conversion and a move into retail. On the former, the big news is not just a better quality scan, because a computer doesn't have to recognize content for a scanner to work. But it does if you want optical character recognition to turn paper books into the ePub format that publishers like and that Google supports. Suddenly you have instant e-book backlist when electronic files are not readily available.

When I discussed ePub last month, I mentioned how I could see Google partnering with Barnes & Noble or Borders to carry public domain books. The On Demand Books tie now makes that easy. How much would it take to start putting one Espresso machine in key regional chain stores, using the ability of a carrier such as UPS Ground or FedEX Ground to get packages within a state overnight inexpensively to provide next day deliver of titles on demand? Go to the site, order the book, and have it in your hands or at the local store by tomorrow. Start with out-of-print and then extend to backlists. It's not hard to see that whether the Google Book settlement is ultimately approved or not, the company has had the chance to forge business relationships with publishers. And it's not hard to see that these two announcements should spell considerable concern for Amazon.

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