Google eBookseller: Don't be evil.

[mckitterick]

Today, the Google eBookstore makes its bow. They're working with 9000 publishers big and small, and they let publishers choose the price - starting at $9.99/book.

Here's a good analysis of what Google's up to.

They use a cloud-computing model, so you don't need to store your books on your device. Their books will run on every e-device except the Kindle, which I find interesting: Is this Amazon fighting Google or Google trying to crush Amazon?

Google comes into bookselling with a few huge advantages: They own massive mountains of data about everyone who uses the internet, and they have been scanning and sharing books for years now in a way that looks very much like piracy, but they have the money to successfully fight legal challenges. So they own massive mountains of ebooks ready to give you for free. Clearly they've been preparing for this for years, despite their denials during the legal challenges to their book-scanning efforts.

The NPR commentator this morning says that ebooks will be 85% of all book sales in 10 years. Google wants a piece of that pie!

Chris

Comments

[klingonguy.livejournal.com]

I was a bit annoyed with the NPR report because the commentator made a statement about being able to read Google's ebooks on any computer that had access to the web. This implies that you can't do that with other ebooks which is obviously false. Sigh, NPR, you have disappointed me yet again.

[skaldic.livejournal.com]

Unless I'm reading their page wrong, they offer PDFs, which are readable by the Kindle, so it's still usable for Kindle owners...

[ryltar.livejournal.com]

When they say any e-device, I wonder if they include webOS, blackberry, etc devices...