Making books more accessible

I confess to be a major bookworm. I am always looking for access to books wherever I go. Living in Boston, I am fortunate to be able to easily go to a great many local bookstores such as the Harvard bookstore or Rodney’s in Central Square and spend many leisurely hours browsing through the books, old and new, in those stores.

When at home, I also have access to books through sites such as the Online Books page and the Google Books search site. Sometimes, I can read books for free on online document sites such as Scribd.com or Docstoc.com. Nevertheless, there are books that are not available at all online and the only way to find them is either to buy online on Amazon or swap with someone else via one of the online book swaps, or to get the physical copy in a bookstore. For older or rare books that are already out of print, most of the alternatives above do not work. In that case, we resort to a tried and true method of looking for the book in a local library or obtain it at a local library through an interlibrary loan.

So what’s the point of this? I think the ability to search in local library catalogs should be built into books search engines, so that when we search for a book, we really get all the possible ways to access that book, not simply through the limited online channels we have today.

Right now, searching for books in Google return just the online preview and a list of online book sellers.

 

The “perfect” book search should results first in a list of books, and then when the user clicks on the title of the book they are interested in, it should give them the following options for accessing the books:

– Previewing the book
– Buying hardcopy online
– Buying audiobook version online, or from the ITunes store
– Buying digital copy for popular ebooks platform such as the Nook, Kindle or Ipad
– Renting hardcopy of the book from an online rental service such as Bookswim.
– Swapping the book with another user
– Borrowing from a local public library, based on the user’s IP address and/or zipcode

It should then also poll more readers’ reviews, editorial reviews and citations from various sources, including Amazon, Shelfari, Goodreads together with ebooks sites to allow the interested reader to make the informed choice.

You can push this thinking a bit further and think of the Iphone or Android version of this book search – it now uses location data to help locate the local library to search, or even search in your friends’ books collection if they live nearby.

I am not good enough of a interface designer to quickly whip up a prototype of this application, but i thought someone with some experience in agile product development can certainly build up a quick mashup using existing tools.

This is simply an example of a larger theme: Search engines do not have to simply search for online documents and digital entities – search engines should seamlessly blend the online and offline results together and present them in a way such that the most relevant item, be it digital or physical, comes up top. I hope other search engine startups are thinking this way and eventually incorporate this idea into their product and development strategy.

Edit (3/27/2010) – The Google Books search result page does present a link for “Find in a library”, which links to WorldCat.org, the “meta” library catalog site that search across all local library catalogs that are available online. However, I still stand by my observation that even with that functionality, the book searching experience is still far from being “perfect”, and my ideas of integrating location and local information (not just local library) are still valid.