GW ePublishing

If Net Neutrality is clobbered the way the telcos hope it will be, the next Web or YouTube won’t come from disruptive inventors in a garage; it will come from the corporate labs at one of the five big media consortia or one of a handful of phone and cable companies.

Here’s something every creator, every free speech advocate, every copyright maximalist and every copyfighter should agree on: allowing the channels to audiences to be cornered by a handful of incumbents is bad news for all of us. It doesn’t matter that the lame-duck, sellout FCC won’t stand up for us. It doesn’t matter that Canada’s CRTC and the UK’s Ofcom are no better, that regulators around the world are as toothless as newborns. This is the big fight for us – the fight over who gets to decide who will be heard and how.

but Google eBookstore suddenly gives booksellers a reason to at least wade into SEO.

But what about new books and ebooks? How does Google determine which new titles, and the more than 15 million books that have been scanned, float to the top of its search results pages: in the web search box and in the ebookstore. The challenge, for Gray and other Google engineers on the Books project, is that the best known component of Google's algorithm for determining the the value of a web resource -- the number of links to it by others -- does not apply to books and ebooks. Although it is possible to link to a selection in certain books on Google Books (here's a hyperlink into the aforementioned Galbraith title) people don't generally create links to the contents of a book or ebook. So linking is not a reliable indicator of quality.

One strategy that Google employs is to tap into the book industry's "rich tradition of metadata.

But converting image-heavy books into digital form has not been easy. Authors are careful to monitor how their work appears on a screen, and publishers have struggled to replicate the experience of reading a print book

The prices of e-books with pictures be generally in line with print prices.

Some publishers have also had success breaking into the digital space by turning books into applications for mobile devices