As part of Google’s campaign to enter the ever growing business of e-books, it will be launching Google Editions in early 2010. This will serve as a new online service that will enable internet users buy e-books and read them on any device with a web browser. Amazon will surely be a direct competitor of Google editions with its Kindle store as well as Sony’s eBook store.
On its opening day, Google editions will sell over 500,000 titles coming from different publishers. Interested buyers can buy either from Google or from other booksellers using Google Editions platform.
Google said that publishers will have the freedom to set their ‘own’ prices for their e-books whereas in Amazon, publishers felt that they were rip-off because of the low price points of e-books compared with hardbound books. Google will get 37% on every purchased e-book while 67% of the purchase price will go to the publisher.
Earlier this year, Google faced legal criticisms over its Google book search (formerly known as Google Print) for digitally printing over 10 million books in the past 5 years – since 2004. On its defense, Google claimed that those books available for online viewing were already in the “public domain search” and were out of copyright limits. And as for the books still under copyright, only the summary or snippets can be seen online.
Our take
The e-book business have grown very rapidly over the last 5 years (and still growing). Amazon with its over 300,000 book titles have been in the e-book industry for several years now while Sony with 100,000 book titles had just entered the business recently.
You know why many big firm including Yahoo, Microsoft and the American Publishers can’t let Big G to enter the e-book business? This is because of fear that Google might take over the e-book business from them just like what it did with Yahoo (search engine industry).
Other tech companies just can’t take Google as a competition. It could be bad for them but good for us e-book users. Competition in business is always good. (via Daily Mail)
TweetRelated News and Resources:
Tags: e-books, Google book search, google books, Google Editions, Google prints, Google will sell e-books, online e-book store
