Google’s long awaited e-book-only bookstore, Google eBooks, puts the company in competition with Amazon, Apple and Borders for the burgeoning electronic-book market. The move, limited at the start to U.S. customers only, also marks the first real retail venture for the search and online-advertising behemoth, if you don’t count the Android app market. The company claims that it will have more books in its catalog than any other online bookstore — more than 3 million titles, but only about 200,000 of those are books licensed from publishers. About 2.8 million of the books are books no longer under copyright in the United States that Google has scanned from university libraries as part of its controversial Google Books project. Started in 2004, Google Books has scanned millions of books, mostly without permission from copyright holders, making them searchable online.
Google is seeking to differentiate itself from Amazon and its popular Kindle reader by selling books that can be read on a wide range of devices, from iPhones, iPads and Android-based devices, along with computers running any browser that can use JavaScript. Books can also be read on Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Sony’s E Reader, but not on Amazon’s Kindle — because of compatibility issues with the Adobe copyright management DRM attached to the e-books, Google said.
All of the largest publishers, except for Random House, are opting for a model where the publishers set the price and Google and other retailers are simply acting as their agents. In this model, publishers and Google/retailers roughly split the price.
Read more at Wired
