Luke Hubbard

Google has already scanned millions of books from libraries across the globe, much of which are available at Books.Google.com. Now, they’re offering consumers the opportunity to custom print the books back to paper copy. In true Google spirit, they blazed ahead with the book scanning process before completely figuring out how the legal side of things would work out. As always, Google stuck to their company mission, which is to organize the world’s information, and they gambled that the rest would work out (how could it not?).

Now, Google has partnered with On Demand Books to created a machine that turns electronic books back into paper copied for the price of about $10. The machine itself costs about $100,000 and it prints books in about 4 minutes. Wow, now old and rare out of publish books will be available to consumers in minutes.

The only obstacle will be finding one of the printing machines, which haven’t yet been widely distributed to booksellers past the first installations in: the Northshire Bookstore in Vermont, the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, the University of Michigan Shapiro Library in Ann Arbor, the Blackwell Bookshop in London, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the University of Alberta Bookstore in Canada, and the Angus & Robertson Bookstore in Australia.

Even if a hundred more machines are sold and installed, the majority of the world will still be left longing for this service… or will they? The demand for out of publish public domain books hasn’t been a massive market. Will booksellers be able to sell enough paper copies of these books to make up for th $100,000 investment, especially considering their revenue cut will be about $3 a book. Note that users already have electronic access to all of the books through http://books.google.com/.

You can even embed the books on web pages such as your blog…

All notes taken from “Wired” available at CNN.

- Luke Hubbard

One of my favorite online radio sites is Pandora. You can stream music for free based on artist, song, or genre. Basically, you create a station based on something you like, then Pandora streams similar music to that station.

You can’t save or download songs, but I find that I don’t need to anymore. Pandora allows me to listen to seemingly unlimited music from my desktop or Blackberry. (It’s available for iPhone too).

If you’re not a Pandora user already, I strongly suggest signing up!