Google, Amazon offer classics, blockbusters for download

Internet megaliths Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. blazed forth over the past few days vowing to change The World As We Know It with book and movie download schemes for all of the Web surfing credit card holders living on the aforementioned planet.

Amazon got the jump on Apple Computer Inc. with the debut of Unbox, a scheme to let shoppers download newly released-to-video Hollywood movies and TV shows for between $1.99 and $20 instead of buying them as shrink-wrapped DVDs.

Meanwhile, Google launched a free, albeit restricted, downloadable books scheme.

First I'll cover Google's giveaway, and then Amazon's movie-by-modem gambit.

Google has started letting users of the controversial Google Book Search service download, in Adobe PDF format, tens of thousands of books with expired copyrights.

These free-for-the-taking gems have been scanned along with much of the copyrighted material held in the world's libraries. Despite protests from the publishing industry and among academics, Google is scanning collections at the University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford and the University of California system.

The resulting PDFs are written by dead white guys like Billy Shakespeare and Teddy Roosevelt. They are collected as Google continues its massive project of scanning the world's ink-on-paper libraries into computer format.

You can search the full text of each copyrighted and public domain book at http://books.google.com.

However, the copyright rules, at best, only let you look at a few pages of the actual text. Pages are grudgingly displayed on the screen as photographs rather than useable text.

Some publishers and authors have agreed to let Google offer up a handful of actual pages of their books for sale, but without permissions the rules say you only get a "snippet" of about six lines showing the keyword of the search.

When you find a book that you've just got to have, you can buy it from Amazon.com or other advertisers who pay Google for your clicks. For mopes like your humble correspondent who happen to have a highly dangerous one-click ordering account at Amazon, this will add impulse buying to Amazon's already booming book business.

And don't think Google isn't profiting from the public domain treasury of literature and entertainment either. Not only are the free books scattered by default like loss leaders among titles for sale, but Google also could sell ads based on the interests you display by checking a specific title.

It's difficult to complain about Google giving away public domain volumes, but it should be noted that Google is undermining a number of free services that have been doing essentially the same thing for a long time. Most prominent is Project Gutenberg, at www.gutenberg.org,that has acquired 19,000 titles that volunteers have typed into their word processors.

Gutenberg.org downloads can be searched on one's hard drive because they are in text files. Google's giveaways come as humongous PDF files that cannot be keyword searched while offline. Another longtime source of free material is advertising-based Bartleby Online, at www.bartleby.com, that offers a similar gold mine.

Speaking of undercutting rivals, you can download "The Manchurian Candidate" with Denzel Washington for a mere $10.99 at the Unbox area of Amazon.com.

But as with Google Books, adding a computer to the mix adds rules and more rules.

Start with the rule from Amazon that downloaded movies can only be played on a single computer and on a companion portable device that can play files in Microsoft's WMA format.

The service doesn't include iPods, but Mac users won't be out in the cold for long. Release of these same types of movies in iPod format is expected soon at Apple's iTunes music store.

Amazon's movie downloads take a long time but the payoff is that the movies and television shows look great on the screen because of their high resolution. Customers download a small file in WMA format for their portables and then download the huge movie files that are often more than 2.2 gigabytes.

On the upside, Amazon says that customers with high-speed cable modems will be able to watch the movie as it is downloaded and then burn it on a DVD for later play on the licensed computer. You wait five minutes until the buffer is filled and then watch the film in real time as the rest downloads.

Amazon also lets customers buy films and TV shows using computers at the office to have them downloaded to their computers at home. Likewise cell phone users with Web service also can order downloads for watching later at home.

It's all done using Amazon's Unbox program that handles the proprietary code used to encrypt the videos and to enforce the rules.

You'll get details when you log on to Amazon.com.

And, to quote from my free Shakespeare, that's the rub. Because of anti-piracy concerns and technical issues, the instructions for Unbox customers read like a chapter in the law review on torts and contracts.

Let me remind you that rules and more rules also rub when one explores Google Books. But keep in mind that behind all those rules there are some real jewels.