'Google Print' against 'Search Inside the Book' by Amazon

Google Encroaches on Amazon As Rivalries Grow
By NICK WINGFIELD and KEVIN J. DELANEY Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 7, 2004; Page B3
SAN FRANCISCO -- The Web's biggest companies, seeking new avenues for growth, are invading each other's turf with gusto.
The latest example: Search-engine kingpin Google Inc. is introducing a program called Google Print to a broad audience of book publishers that want to let users search the content of their books on the Internet. Google Print is an expansion of an initiative that the company has been testing for several months on a more-modest scale with some publishers.
The move pits Google, of Mountain View, Calif., against a similar effort by Amazon.com Inc. called Search Inside the Book, which lets shoppers sample from more than 100,000 books as an enticement to make a purchase.
The rivalry between Google and Seattle-based Amazon is just one example of how the barriers between once-discrete markets -- such as Web searching, auctions and retail -- gradually are breaking down. The changes are leading to more spirited competition in a variety of areas, including efforts to transform online outposts from ordinary Web sites into integral pieces of software products created by independent programmers.
"Google, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay are on a collision course," says Bill Gross, chairman of venture-capital firm Idealab, which introduced a search-engine company this week at a conference here. "They're all stepping into each other's territory, and it's going to lead to interesting battles."
The race to make books as searchable as other forms of content is creating one of the more closely watched rivalries in the Internet business. Google yesterday said it asked publishers to send their books to be digitally scanned by Google so consumers can search for key words in the texts through Google's search site. An unspecified number of books are available as part of a test.
Google said the participating publishers include Pearson PLC, John Wiley & Sons Inc., Walt Disney Co.'s Hyperion, Scholastic Inc. and Oxford University Press. The Web-search company previously launched a test service allowing users to search the text of some first chapters and book-jacket blurbs through the Google site.
"This is going to be exciting for publishers because it's an opportunity to attract new readers and increase book sales," said Susan Wojcicki, Google product-management director. Google expects to publicly discuss the book-searching capability today at a book fair in Frankfurt.
Consumers who search book texts view images of the pages themselves, though they are prevented from browsing more than a limited portion of a book online. Google and the book publishers share revenue from advertisements, which appear alongside the pages. Google will include links to online retail sites where consumers can buy the books, sales from which Google says it won't receive any compensation. Amazon.com is one of the book sites to which Google will provide links.
Google played down any increased competition with Amazon, which separately licenses Google's search engine and buys online advertisements through the search company. "They are a valued partner to us," said Ms. Wojcicki. An Amazon spokesman said Amazon doesn't comment on other companies' plans.
Yet Amazon also is pushing into the book-searching field on its own, along with the market for searching the wider Web. The Internet retailer last year created a search-engine subsidiary in California's Silicon Valley called A9, which blends information from Google's massive index of the Web with search results from other sources of information controlled by Amazon.
One notable person closely associated with Google and Amazon, venture-capitalist John Doerr, acknowledged that the two companies' evolutions ultimately could force some tough decisions. At the San Francisco Internet conference this week, Mr. Doerr, an early investor in Amazon and Google and a director at both, was pressed whether he eventually might need to step down from the board of one of the companies, because of increasing competition. Mr. Doerr said it wasn't an issue, but if it arose, "I would do the honorable thing." He didn't say which board he would stay on.
At the Internet conference here this week, the success of Google's initial public stock offering was a shot in the arm for the attendees, a collection of industry executives and venture capitalists in pursuit of big ideas they hope will reshape the Internet. A prominent theme emphasized at the conference was the notion that Google, Amazon, eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc. increasingly are relying on an important set of constituents to stay competitive: programmers developing a class of software called "Web services."
EBay executives discussed how the San Jose, Calif., company has created technical interfaces that allow programmers to write software that hooks directly into eBay's Web site, including programs that let auction sellers list large numbers of items for sales on eBay. Amazon, too, is heavily promoting its own set of technical interfaces and says it has 65,000 Web programmers using them. Those programmers can create Web sites that pluck a wide range of data from Amazon's sites in real time, including statistics on best-selling books.
Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos demonstrated one such Web site, Musicplasma.com, which displays a graphical map of musical artists and similar-sounding bands, relationships that are based on shopping-data supplied by Amazon. "I think you will see a huge amount of creativity unleashed there" because of Amazon's technology, Mr. Bezos said.
Some high-tech prognosticators believe the effort by big Internet companies to court developers eventually could threaten Microsoft Corp., a company whose strength rests on its dominant Windows operating system. Idealab's Mr. Gross said Microsoft also faces a threat from companies providing services on the Web that could reduce consumers' use of Microsoft software.
By getting programmers to treat their Web sites as technical standards of sorts, executives believe Amazon and others also can make it more difficult for rivals to compete against them. "It's all about building barriers to entry," Mr. Gross said.