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Google Android and the Kindle - The Start of a Revolution
Google is once again at the epicentre of the latest explosion that has hit both the digital and offline worlds. This time it involves the publishing industry and Google’s dream of altering it forever with the Google Books Settlement which has caused a massive uproar in publishing and author circles. This is set to be the biggest change in the book world since the printing press.
Armed with this information I predict that Google will release a reading device powered by Android that integrates with Google Books. With this, one will be able to read books based on a subscription model where you buy reading time instead of whole eBooks. This idea follows the way iTunes altered the industry by selling individual tracks rather than the whole album. With Google Books obtaining the rights to digitalize millions of books, there is no end in sight. The publication industry has been too set in their ways and now it’s time to embrace change and technology in a way that makes sense for both the publishing sector and the end-users. Watch this space, crazy things are about to happen!
According to Sergey Brin, co-founder & president of technology at Google, their mission is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor.” This mindset is one that deserves great admiration, and one that this industry should start adopting. With the release of the Kindle and other digital reading devices, information and knowledge can be accessed in far greater amounts and distributed far easily. This revolution has taken the world by storm with Amazon selling more eBooks than hard copy books on Christmas Day in 2009.
With technology affecting almost every aspect of the world, huge shifts are occurring in almost all industries, with the biggest shift currently happening in the publishing industry. Publishers and bookstores are dying as a result of emerging technologies, but that isn’t to say that books are no longer, they just come in a new format – digital!
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