The slides and data from Jon Orwant’s presentation on Google Book Search at TOC, that were not available when I wrote previously, have now been put up on the O’Reilly site. [these have been removed, see comment below] This is made up of 59 PDF slides, covering a range of recent developments with Google Books, including the recent release of GBS mobile, and a discussion of the Oct 2008 Publisher settlement. The part I’m most interested in is the data on GBS usage that had been mentioned by Orwant in various venues before, but with few details. The details in the TOC presentation are mostly in three “Case studies” of publishers that participate in the GBS Partner Plan — McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, and Springer. I’ve chosen one slide for each of these publishers that show various long-tail effects for usage of their books that are in GBS, and one slide that has data for a more extensive grouping from GBS.

McGraw-Hill case study is presented in slides 21-23. Below is slide 24. Note that this is a small sample of only the top 30 titles.

Oxford University Press – Slides 26-31. Below is slide 27. Note the long tail of visits for pre-1990 books.

Springer – Slides 32-36. Below is slide 35, showing clicks for Buy this Book. Note again the very long tail of clicks for pre-1995 books.

Slide 37 below shows “Share of books with more than 10 pages viewed”, apparently for all books in GBS. The coloring of the data lines looks ambiguous to me – The lowest line is undoubtedly for Snippet View books. It looks like the top line is for Limited Preview, which are presumably higher than Full View books, apparently the middle line, because Limited Preview books are more current.

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