The Darwinian Publishing Model and Google

The Darwinian Publishing Model stands on three legs; 1) an author's or content owner's ability to publish web searchable content, 2) ubiquitous devices from which to conduct search and receive content, and 3) robust search capability.

Google clearly intends to play in all three legs of this publishing model. Two recent reports are very interesting.  First, the Digits blog of WSJ.com reports that Google has just reached 1 Billion unique users per month. Not searches, but unique users.  What's the population of the earth anyway?

Second, Google has reached an agreement with the British Library to digitize 250,000 books, or 40 million pages that will be available for search, downloading, or reading for free.  This is content in addition to millions of book titles slated for access from the Google Book Settlement.

Finally, Google is pushing hard on the device side of the equation with their Android Mobile OS, available for smartphones and tablets. Already, there are multiple Android tablets available, this one here from Samsung.

Google is uniquely positioned to vertically integrate this publishing model. It is acquiring huge amounts of content by first tying up the rights to out of print and unclaimed titles, and second by agreements with the old school publishers.  Their market share for search continues to grow and ensure that searches for this content will run through Google's servers (and advertisers).  Finally, the Android Mobile OS growing popularity means that more and more searches will originate from and deliver to devices powered by Google.

The great game that Google is playing is not about publishing, but about who is reading and searching for what and selling that to their advertisers.  More on this in a future post.