Springer Science+Business Media has issued a press release touting its happy relationship with Google Book Search, which features more than 29,000 of the publisher’s titles in its digital archive. “At first we were afraid about putting excerpts of our books on Book Search. We thought people might read and then leave,” the release quotes Springer book sales VP Paul Manning. “Instead, Google has proven to be a powerful marketing tool.” Manning attributes a rise in backlist sales to the program, and the company observes that its engineering and computer science books account for nearly 30 percent of all the books bought through GBS.* Which perhaps isn’t too surprising: After all, the Safari program at O’Reilly has, in its own proprietary and subscription-based fashion, long demonstrated the utility of online searches for IT professionals.
*Oops: the actual wording of the release is that “engineering and computer science books have done particularly well, representing 14 percent and 15 percent, respectively of the clicks on Google’s ‘buy this book’ link.” Which, an eagle-eyed reader hastened to point out, isn’t quite the same thing as the books actually being bought.