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CinoBoo comments on Google employees on Reddit: Fire up your throwaway accounts and tell us what it's REALLY like to work for google?
Reminds me of this: The database brings the reality of competition with EVERY SINGLE BOOK EVER PUBLISHED into sharp focus for publishers as new books face increased real challenges from books published 10, 20, 300 years ago and in every conceivable context, on a phone, laptop, desk computer, iPad, iPod, wi-fi enable device, anything that connects to the cloud and has a screen (not to mention an increase in POD). So if the web enabled a flood of amateur (and let’s face it not always terribly good) content, Google’s books database enables a flood of real professional content that rings true with quality and which at a time when being published was harder than it is now has the stamp of publishers approval. This onslaught threatens directly the lifeblood of all publishing, the new book trade, in ways that all publishers rightly fear.Most of them [those who work on the Google search algorithm] - actually, all of them that I know - are really nice and freakishly brilliant. I’d highly recommend chatting with them or picking up a 20% project - there’s tons of awesome data and useful algorithms that are just sitting around. The publicly-exposed UI of Google is only the tip of the iceberg…there’s lots of interesting information that we know how to extract but haven’t figured out how to present to users in a way that would be useful for them.Right there is the bit that should make everyone in print publishing shit their pants. Google isn’t UI-centric, like Apple. But that could happen at some point. And then Google will have a way of unleashing that data. When they do, publishing will have no chance of survival.
