Last January, I signed up with Google Print to help promote upFront.eZine's line of e-books. I was part of the beta program working with PDF files.
(Until then, Google Print worked only with printed books. I am guessing they hired a scanning and digitizing firm in India to rip out the pages and scan/digitize them to some raster format.)
I figured that converting PDF files to Google's database would be a trivial exercise, especially my short e-books, which are in the range of 100-250 pages. But something at the Google end screwd up majorly. Google, tight-lipped as always, isn't saying what the problem is, but did send out apology packets to publishers, such as myself. I now have a Google maniquin desktop clock. With bendable arms and legs. Cute.
It's now been seven months. In the last month, one of my e-books was processed, and today I notice three more. The Google Print process goes through four stages:
1. Upload -- set up the account, rename the PDF files with their ISBNs, and upload them to Google. This step took me an hour or two.
2. Pending -- the PDF files sit on some server, waiting processing. This step has taken Google seven months.
3. Processed -- the PDF files are converted to Google format, probably a combination of JPEG and database code that links the page images with searchable text.
4. Live -- the book is available on the Internet, and appears at the top of Google's search results.
One of my print books "Using AutoCAD 2005" (Autodesk Press) is available on Google Print, if you are interested in seeing what it looks like: click here. Discouragingly enough, the book does not appear when words such as "AutoCAD", "Using AutoCAD", or "AutoCAD 2005" are entered into Google's seach engine -- only the compete title works, "Using AutoCAD 2005".
(You cannot view some pages without first signing in with some sort of Google account, such as GMail. Google claims the reason is that the books are under copyright. The real reason, I suspect, is to better track your viewing habits.)
Comments