What’s the definition of a book?

One of the many challenges that Google Books presents is, in my opinion, the definition of a ‘book’.

Why? Well, what is a ‘book’? It’s a linear, narratively-driven argument. It starts at the first chapter and ends at the last. It has progression and purpose. It is controlled by an author (or by a team of authors, under some unity of intention). It wants to inform you or convince you about something. When we pick up a book and read it from page 1, we assume that it is going to provide us with forward-movement, such that page 10 will build on page 9, and chapter 17 will build on chapter 16. That is the unique nature of the book. It needs to be understood as a whole.

Of course, in reality, life doesn’t work like that. We rarely have time to consume information in that way. We need to extract information from a larger whole. Whatever industry we work in, whether it is academic or professional, we bite-off and chew smaller pieces of content than we are presented with. We scan headlines in a newspaper. We scan SERPS from a search engine. We scan summaries and headings of reports. And then add to this mix the reality of how we consume information online. We read blogs. We watch snippets of video. We hop around widgets.

Somewhere in the middle of all this is the challenge for the publishing industry. We publish books. But aren’t books too big and unwieldy for the internet?

That’s where Google Books comes in, and why the recent publicity like this and this surrounding the end of the author agreement matters. Because Google wants to aggregate books into, for want of a better phrase, ‘smaller pieces’. What happens if a customer needs only the third chapter of that book to solve a problem? Well, Google wants to make it easy for you to filter the content you need from the chaff, and then they'll sell it to you.Now I’m ignoring the business case for all this – just for now. I’ll post about that some other time. And I think that delivering ‘data solutions’ to people is crucial and will be central to all our publishing efforts for years to come.

But my question is: how do you read a book as a ‘book’ like this? Will packaging, selling and delivering books in this way ultimately undermine their unique purpose in the world? Is Google Books capable of presenting book material and giving it the space it needs to breathe? Will it end up undermining the relevance of a book?

Eventually, publishers will need to decide whether – ironically – Google Books is in fact sacrificing too much of the quality of the book reading experience.