OK, now I see how Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) intends to make money from its controversial Google Books project.
Big G rolled out improvements to its book-searching tool today, and the changes are many. A new thumbnail view of results can give you an overview of an entire magazine, page by page. Public domain materials are now available in plain-text format, suitable for copying and pasting or to feed into screen readers for the visually impaired.
A revamped book-reading interface for the books Google has the right to show in their entirety make Google Books nearly as intuitive as the Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Kindle. Fire this puppy up in your Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPod and you could have a reasonably usable book reader in your pocket for no extra cost. And there's more.
But above all, the new and improved service draws on the social aspects of Google's YouTube video service. Now it's quick and easy to share pages or chapters of a book in your blog post or Twitter tweet. An improved full-text search also helps you find the clips you want or need.
And the pages of results are generously peppered with context-sensitive ads. Leafing through Philip Toshio Sudo's Zen Guitar, I was offered guitar lessons in Tampa, discounts on Electronic Arts' (Nasdaq: ERTS) Rock Band game, and home-study guitar courses. These were rotated in an unobtrusive way next to the text I was reading, and obviously relevant to what I was doing.
Sure, it's simply a new way to integrate the classic AdSense advertising platform into everything Google does. But add in the viral nature of easy social platform links, and you have a dynamite combination. It doesn't work quite as well on YouTube because videos demand your full attention in a way that plain words on a page cannot.
Google has enlisted the help of partners like Princeton, Harvard, and the New York Public Library System to scan every available ounce of written-word content into Google's databases. I'd love to see Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) try to top this service without paying license fees to Google for tapping into this treasure trove.
Google Books may not ever be the biggest money-maker in Mountain View, but it can certainly pull its own weight and then some. And it's just one more example of how Google can make money from organizing the world's information and making it accessible and useful.
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