Thunder Bay’s own Scott Dougall spearheads Google project

A local hand has been helping Google in its quest to create a massive online e-bookstore that already offers millions of publications to U.S. readers.

Thunder Bay native Scott Dougall left his hometown in 2006. He later began a job at Technicolor where he served as the company’s senior vice-president of global services management. Dougall worked to convert content from feature length films, television shows and music scores into digital files to sell online.

That experience helped attracted the attention of Google as the company looked to take on its massive e-book project.

"I was hired specifically to work on this," Dougall said in a phone interview with tbnewswatch.com. "When I worked with Technicolor, I brought media online for sale. E-Books are the next step in digital media."

Google Editions launched on Monday, Dec. 6 in the US. Editions is an online bookstore that allows users to access more than 3 million books and read them on multiple devises – PCs, smartphones, netbooks, and other electronic devices.

The e-bookstore is part of the company’s plan to move classic novels and other public domain works from the bookshelf to the digital world.

Google hired Dougall in August to run and manage the project and has since given him the official title of director and project manager for Google Editions. Dougall is also one of four official Google spokespersons for the Editions project.

Dougall said Editions was a two-stage initiative: scan 50 million books from around the world and get major publishers onboard with the project.

"We started getting closer partnerships with the publishers and gain more access to their books," he said. "We have found over 35,000 publishers and made their content more available online. We have scanned over 50 million books from over a hundred different countries in 400 different languages."

Despite a Canadian being a part of the project, the Google e-bookstore isn’t available in Canada just yet. The U.S. launched made the service available to U.S. residents, and an international launch that will include Canada is expected sometime in the first half of next year.

Once launched internationally, Dougall said Google will work closer with Canadian publishers in an effort to increase Edition’s Canadian content.