Ebook

Be optimized!”

That's what Ben Finklea scrawled on the title page of his book, Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization as he stood in the lobby of MIT's PeeWee's-Playhouse-like Stata Center on the second day of a weekend Drupal Design Camp, where I went to hear him speak on search engine optimization (SEO).

A few months earlier I probably would have slept in. Ebooks aren't Googled, right? Doesn't the Googlebot stop at the virtual cover? Who cares about that damn spidery bot. Can I skip the SEO class?

Turns out, no. Because once you create a website for the ebook, like this one, you have to think about being "discoverable."

I spoke to Matthew Gray, lead software engineer of Google Books Search Quality about the visibility of ebooks on Google.

"Our goal is making all the world's information universally accessible and useful, and we believe that a lot of the world's information is in books," he said. "So it's important to us to make that information available. If you need to know something about a disease, or a travel destination, there's good chance the best information is in a book."