When Google Met Wikileaks by Julian Assange (OR Books) How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg with Alan Eagle (Hodder & Stoughton)

Google is the emblematic internet company. All of the others are, in various ways, specialized. Apple is a high-end gadget-maker, Facebook and Twitter are social networkers, and Microsoft is the bewildered dinosaur. But Google is all things to all clickers. It is, for the moment, the internet.

Its mission statement (“ ... to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) in effect makes that claim. The projected style of the company—more loose and freewheeling than Apple, less narrow in scope than Facebook—creates a mood of cool, go-anywhere, do-anything excitement. Google acquires and announces products seemingly at random and indulges in experimentation (like its self-driving car) as if just for the hell of it.

In truth, nothing is random or freewheeling. More than 90 percent of Google’s revenues come from advertising. These ads are sold and targeted on the basis of the information the company acquires, overwhelmingly without payment, from its users. We are its product; our information is its asset base. There is nothing inherently wrong or sinister about this. Tactically, however, it is better for Google to be seen as a technology company rather than a seller of advertising space.

These books add new layers to the ambiguity. For Julian Assange, Google is all but an arm of the U.S. state department (or, indeed, vice versa). For the company’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, and Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to its CEO, Larry Page, Google is the model of the 21st-century company.

Assange’s account is funnier and faster. It is written like a hammy thriller and, narcissist that he evidently is, the author is the hero. The Schmidt-Rosenberg book is a jaunty but dull read if you are not a tech entrepreneur, though, with patience, it becomes fascinating even if you’re not.