As part of a deal announced Thursday, Google is opening up part of its index to the maker of a high-speed publishing machine that can manufacture a paperback-bound book of about 300 pages in under five minutes. The new service is an acknowledgment by the Internet search leader that not everyone wants their books served up on a computer or an electronic reader like those made by Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Inc.

Google to reincarnate digital books as paperbacks
The machines sell for $100K, so there will probably be one in every college bookstore by 2015. The breakdown was that the sample 300 pg book should retail for $8, with $1 each going to the retailer and $1 going to Google.
The Gutenberg press was revolutionary because it made it affordable to to print a million copies of any 1 document. The Gootenberg press Google instant press can print any public domain book, probably in less than 10 minutes.

For the record, this was already fully possible with a simple laser printer and access to Gutenberg.org.

DISCLAIMER (12/2/2011): It has been brought to my attention, that there has in fact been a company (founded in the 1970′s) called “Gootenberg Press,” the family of this company  has requested that I be mindful of that fact. Please be aware that this article has nothing to do with the writings of anyone with the last name of ‘Gootenberg’ and that the actual device created by Google is not been named the ‘Gootenberg Press’ by Google. This post is not to be in any way associated with anything related to the Gootenberg family. I have renamed the post, and made a few modifications to the content.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.
…
The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

The situation seems not to be as dire as originally thought. The books deleted were never authorized for sale on the Kindle, and Amazon was trying to correct its mistake out of consideration for the publisher. All the same, Amazon has said that they will respond differently should a similar situation arise in future.
Issues like this seem unavoidable to me as long as DRM remains standard practice, and the risk that an outside force will exercise control over MY books has certainly depressed a few sales. The early days of any new medium will be rough.
Another way of dealing with this issue completely might be the possibility of subscription access to set libraries. Much along the model of Safari books. In that model, the concept of ownership is replaced with ‘access’ to volumes of helpful info. That access is sold in terms of scope or length of time.

HT to Brian Hollar @ Thinking on the Margin, who is also following the ebook trend.

To those of you who on reading that react by thinking, “Of course they will!” I’d like to direct you toward some data from the World Resource Institude which indicates that from 1995 to 2005, worldwide paper consumption had increased 27% (12% in the developed world and 70% in the developing world). The implication being that there is a significant challenge to extending E-book usage to the developing world, as it is highly dependent on reliable electricity to read and Internet access to distribute.

E-book Wholesale Revenue

Others might look at my thesis and think, “There’s no possible way.” To them I will begin by pointing out some statistics about the growth of E-book revenue over the past 5 years. From Q1 2004 to Q1 2009, E-book wholesale revenue has increased by 1,338%. Those biggest gains are from the most recent quarter, so if that turns out to be a temporary spike the trend lines could be closer to the true growth rate.

That said, e-books still only constitute 0.5% of the entire book market. Even at that small starting point though, if e-book sales continue to grow at the rate indicated in the orange line (10.07% per quarter), e-book sales could be greater than 50% of the book market by the year 2025. Don’t be foolish enough to think you can bet on that though. Nothing is ever that simple.

There are a lot of benefits to e-books; zero weight, zero volume, easily quoted, highly portable, easily stored, easily distributed and potentially easily shared (though I’m sure the industry will do it’s best to keep that feature controlled).  They are also hard to read, since you need a display that won’t burn your eyes and is as easy to carry around as a paper book would be. The problem of permeating the book market is one of making e-books just as easily read as regular books, which is a technological problem.

Amazon has leaped headlong into this market with the release of their Kindle product line. While plenty of people have looked at the device and decided that it deserves their business, it is far from attracting the scale of user base needed to transform the industry. Sony has also had a reader on the market for a while, though it has not sold nearly as well as the Kindle. There are also rumors that Apple is developing a competing product, which would fit well into their preexisting infrastructure for the Ipod.

We have an ongoing example of an analog publishing medium being replaced with a digital publishing medium in the gradual switch to digital music. Apple started the itunes music store in 2003 as a service to an incredibly small market of mac users who had this new device called an ‘ipod’, or were willing to listen to music on their computers. Today the digital music publishing medium has grown to more than 10% of the entire music market and is projected to grow to 40% by the year 2012. The user base for itunes started small, and stayed small for a while, until seemingly overnight the mainstream became aware of the significant real benefits and lower cost of digital music over cumbersome CD’s. For more on this type of growth scenario, the kindle edition of “Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell is available for $8.54, with no shipping charge since it’s just a download.

A related issue here is Digital Rights Management (DRM). This was used in the early days of itunes and other services to try to relax publisher’s about piracy in this new medium. As of now, DRM is almost completely out of the digital music market, but is still alive and well in the ebook market. The fact is that nearly zero distribution cost increases the supply of a product by a large factor. DRM is an attempt to limit that factor to legal bounds, but that fight is one that I doubt will ever fully succeed.