Opinion

posted on 08 June 2008 16:57

Some publishers are vanity publishers; they get paid a fee by authors to print and publish their novels or other work. Mostly these books are not sales successes but that's the point. The publisher isn't risking any money and, as a rule, book publishers don't go into vanity publishing, it being hard enough to make money in the book trade without printing books no-one is going to buy. But there is an exception.

It's in the atlas and astronomy sides of the publishing market where two vastly rich publishers have their own competing vanity publishing projects which must collectively have cost well over ten million dollars each.

Who are these two odd publishers and what do they have to do with storage?

The answer is that they both store their vast digital files of planet Earth maps and the galaxies, stars, planets, nebulae, gas clouds and supernova remnants on thousands and thousands of disk drives; a riot of JBODS in one case. These are fed in snippets at a time to millions of browser users around the globe who zooom in on the streets of their capital city or local mountain range, tilt it for a 3D view, fly up the Grand Canyon, see Disney World Orlando in a 3D building view that is like Second Life come to life, and traverse light years of infinte space to peer as the Hubble telescope has peered into galactic cores eons and eons of distance away from us.

Will Google ever pay for its stupendous Google Earth effort with ads for Starbucks seen in a street view of New York? How on earth, how in space, will Microsoft ever monetize its Telescope rival to Google Sky? There's only one Restaurant At The End Of The Universe and it doesn't need to advertise.

Both Google and Microsoft are publishers, publishers of the information in their own vast and growing vaster data banks; petabytes of data fed to the eager millions curious about the Earth they inhabit below and the sky above. All that data on shelves and shelves and shelves of disks. Walmart and Tesco could tell Google and Microsoft a thing or too about shelves.

Shelves are crucial to the supermarket business, to shops in general. Every Mom and Pop store knows this. You put stuff on shelves that sells. Shelves cost money and the things on the shelves have to sell. This is retail 101 rule 1, only the shelf rule doesn't seem to apply to Google and Microsoft with their atlas and astronomy publishing effors.

It's very nice; I've just checked out Marin and Point Reyes in California and it cost me nothing. Thank you Sergey Brin. I tip my hat to you Eric Schmidt, but can it really go on? Surely when the Google cash generating machine settles down to a steady state and costs rise, then surely you'll start looking at the profitability of your disk shelves. Then retail 101 rule 2 will apply.

Rule 2? Yes, rule 2; if it's on your shelves and it's free then it's no business being on your shelves. Charge for it or drop it.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}