You have to admire Google. They are applying their own style of disruptive innovation to the book market and in the process could easily do for publishers what MP3 did for the music industry. 

As part of their mission to ‘organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’, Google started scanning out of copyright books in 2004. Since then they have been working with publishers and libraries and now provide more than 7 million books online as images and searchable text. Depending on the copyright status of those books and the wishes of the rights holder, books are viewable in their entirety, as snippets, as excerpts or just as library card references.

What’s so disruptive about that? Google alongside Amazon and other online books pioneers are going to change publishing in at least three important ways:

1. New Economics. Books have always been a hits business with a few really successful books subsidising the publishing costs for others that do less well or fail completely. Now that Google provides a platform for electronic publishing, marketing and even printing books it will reduce the costs of publishing to zero, reduce the risk of printing big runs of books, and make it easier for authors and small publishers to break into the market. Marketing can leverage social networks and future revenues will not only come from people buying the book but advertising and ancillary products and services. Of course, the latest Dan Brown novel will still require the sort of big-ticket marketing that only a major publisher can supply but for many other authors, Google may well work just fine.
2. Saving local bookshops. We all love bookshops but they can only ever offer a small selection of what’s available and most of us turn to Amazon for anything out of the mainstream. Amazon’s deal with a company called On Demand means that bookshops can now install a machine that will print and bind a paperback in 4 minutes from any of the titles that Google holds. That sort of capability makes local bookshops as good if not better than Amazon and even faster to access. It brings rare and out of print works back to the market. And, it means that those who are not ready to read off screen can still participate in Google’s revolution.
3. Changing the way we read. Such a huge library of electronic books is perfect content to drive the new eReader devices. Google’s deals with digital book reader devices like Sony means that all this content can now be delivered straight to your eReader, PC or smartphone. And other devices are coming: Amazon’s Kindle is set for its UK launch in the next few months. And the growing rumours that Apple are about to launch a media tablet device suggest that the masters of category-killing electronics think there’s a big market to be tapped. How long before electronic book reading, already very popular in Japan, becomes mainstream here?

It didn’t take long for Google’s book activities to attract the attention of US publishers and authors’ groups who filed a class action claiming copyright infringements. In 2008, Google agreed a settlement that would provide $125m in back royalties, 67% of all future royalties to writers and publishers, and establish a new registry to ensure that these future royalties would reach the correct right holders. But even this deal has not satisfied some groups who continue to take legal action against Google. Last week, the US Department of Justice also weighed in with challenges.

But, the end result seems likely to be industry who, with the benefit of seeing what happened in music, embrace Google as a partner that can take them rapidly towards a profitable digital future. The fight will then move to the publishers, who face an uncertain future and the device manufacturers and ebook retailers.

So is this the end of the book or the start of a new age of publishing? It looks like we’ll be finding out over the next few years.