Voyage of the Paradigm Ship

My wife and I enjoy watching foreign, independent, and small production house movies—basically anything that’s not Hollywood. A topic frequently dealt with in the movies we gravitate toward (as recommended by Netflix) involves the struggles faced by immigrant persons and families as they try to negotiate the unfamiliar social and cultural environment of a foster or adopted homeland. The other evening we watched a movie entitled The Namesake, which again dealt with this topic.

The movie was pretty good. But what does this have to do with Google Books? Well, the plot of the movie swirled around the name of a nineteenth century Russian author, a certain Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol. I was so intriqued by this Gogol fellow (I confess that I had never heard about him before) that after the movie was over I immediately got out my laptop computer and searched for information about him, and for some stuff he had written. After learning that Gogol lived and wrote in the nineteenth century, I wondered if I could find anything he had written among the public domain titles at Google Books. Sure enough, after a quick search I found a 1917 Alfred A. Knopf edition of Tarus Bulba: A Tale of the Cossacks, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood. Cool. (Hmm, that’s interesting—finding Gogol on Google.)

I knew I could download the book as a pdf, and this would be fine for reading on my computer. But as I earlier described, pdfs are not ideal for reading on small screen mobile hand-held devices like my iPod touch. When I clicked on the download link for Tarus Bulba in Google Books, I noticed something new. In addition to pdf, I was also given the option of downloading the book in epub format.

Epub is a rapidly developing open standard based on XML for the creation, publishing, and distribution of reflowable digital books and publications. A significant barrier to e-book adoption in the market (and society at large) today is the proliferation of proprietary and high-priced devices coupled with inflexible file format support. The promise of epub as a file format standard is device independence. Although issues remain (e.g., digital rights management, including use and re-use rights for book buyers, etc.), with a standard electronic book format authors and publishers can at least get past the uncertainty of volatile and competing delivery technologies. The book itself can easily adapt as needed to life on a reader’s cellphone, media player, hand-held, tablet, or desktop computer.

That Google Books is supporting epub in its public domain offerings is an exciting development, and a neat discovery. I have been so busy that I missed the announcement from Google on August 26. Of the roughly 1.5 million public domain titles on Google Books, over 1 million are now accessible and downloadable in epub format. Wow!

I will spend more time watching the development and adoption of the epub standard. But an immediate consequence of Google making its epub versions publicly downloadable is that I no longer have to make use of the Barnes & Noble eReader work-around. I was never really happy about that. I endured it as the only option at the time. In order to use it, I had to create a Barnes & Noble online account, give a credit card number, search for and “purchase” books (even though they were free) through their online store interface, and then read the books with their commercially branded reader.

To be clear, you still cannot download books (in either pdf or epub) from the browser-based Google Books site on your mobile device. The mobile site is browse, search, and read online only, and requires an active internet connection. However, there is a free software solution on the iPhone/iPod touch, an epub compatible e-book reader called Stanza that can establish a direct download connection with Google Books. (There is also a desktop version of Stanza available for reading and syncing content between your computer and iPod.)

When you launch Stanza you see a Library of previously downloaded Titles, Authors, etc. To access more books, click on the Online Catalog button. This takes you to a pre-installed list of commercial and free e-book sources.

Click on the “+” button to add a link to Google Books.

Click “Add Web Page,” type “Google Books,” add the URL, and then click Save. Google Books is now added to your e-book source list in Stanza. Click this link to launch Google Books within Stanza.

Since you are viewing Google Books as a web page you will have to zoom in to navigate around to the search box and genre lists. For convenience of this demo, I simply clicked on the link to an edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra that came up under Classics.

Zoom in and click on the EPUB download link. Stanza will ask you to confirm by clicking on the “Download” button.

In a moment the downloaded e-book will be added to your Library within Stanza. It’s that easy. Read at your leisure.

At a later point I will offer a more in-depth review of Stanza. (For example, Amazon Kindle readers will be interested to know that the desktop version of Stanza can convert epub into Kindle compatible book files!) Not having a mobile version of Google Books from which to download e-books in Stanza is a minor annoyance. But it is far easier and less icky than having to mess with Barnes & Noble for free books.