google opened their e-bookstore today... since it has been delayed for quite a long time -- i believe it was promised for last christmas -- you could have expected that they'd get it right... and in a number of ways, they did. but there are still some embarrassing glitches that reveal themselves with very little prodding. for example, 2 of the 4 books on the top shelf at the site are lacking proper paragraph indents. that's the kind of thing you should see right away, and fix immediately, certainly before release-day. the one search i tried took me to the wrong page. the flowing-text display gives a nice 2-up display, so you see facing-pages. but scanned-page mode only shows one page at a time, so that's inefficient. in an interesting twist, the text-reflow display mode shows you the pagenumbers from the original book, which means google is keeping track of that variable. (but they don't show you where the pagebreaks are.) the text-resize feature gives some very odd results. in addition to resizing the text, it changes the rule. (the "rule" is the body-text width between margins.) when text-size is increased, the rule is increased too. in and of itself, that's ok, perhaps even to be praised. except that the rule is increased _too_much_, so that not only are the words on the line bigger, but there are _more_ words than there were at the smaller size. this is very bad, both from a typographic perspective, and from a user-expectation perspective. we expect -- based on experience with other text software -- that bigger text-size means _fewer_ words per line... my research has also shown that it's good if you can reproduce the linebreaks and pagebreaks of the scan, but google hasn't given itself the capability to do that. it'd be nice if at least _one_ of the text-resize options gave the end-user the same linebreaks as the p-book, so that we could easily compare the two render-modes. as it is, it's difficult to check if google's o.c.r. is good... (even more so because they don't give you a combined display-mode, where the text is shown next to the scan.) *** there are some other things which are not "problems", but which aren't as full-featured as we'd like 'em to be. google only lets users choose between a miserly 4 fonts. there are only 3 leading choices; 2 are fairly unusable. the text-size choices won't help the visually challenged. *** google claims to have 3 million e-books available now. but i'd bet you they won't give anyone a complete list... oh, and they'll keep your books in the cloud for you... which means they can cut you off any time they want. in sum, at least the thing is out and we can bang on it; but it certainly could've made a more impressive debut. *** ironically, in light of one of the recent threads here, 1 of the 4 books on that top shelf was a republishing of dickens, by penguin, with "enhanced-book" extras. $7.99. those "enhancements" better be damn good... -bowerbird