Slashdot Mirror
Google Set To Tackle eBook Market
Mike writes "Google's latest decision to try its hand selling eBooks promises to make life in the eBook world more interesting, and will likely spur a standards war that in the end may prove beneficial to many consumers. Google's eBook store will pit it directly against Amazon and Amazon's Kindle — an enormously popular eBook reader. This will push many companies to create eBook readers to take advantage of Google's new store, and will flood the market with tough choices. Google does not have a dedicated eBook reader yet, but it seems a logical next step for the search giant."
I seem to remember people saying the same thing about cell phones, but Google is not a hardware company. I'd look for an API and not much else.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
I wonder if anyone else sees the possibility of using android's API's for touch screen to make devices to for ebooks? Not that I like the ebook market or care for it, but it certainly seems logical.
If I am wrong, please feel free to correct me.
AmazonMP3 trying to compete with Itunes.
Few will hear about the new store, and even fewer will switch.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Lets hope they can bring the price down to 'every man'. 400 for a kindle is pretty steep for a lot people, even during the best of times.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Will they be selling books with or withOUT DRM?
I own a Hanlin V3, and to a great extent stopped using it, as I can't get the books I want for it.
I was right at the part of my e-novel where it said: "And the killer's name was....(Low Battery) Unfortunately, I was sitting on the commode, and could not reach the AC adapter. :(
Amazon's Kindle an enormously popular eBook reader.
I'm not sure the description "enormously popular" is deserved. Just because it is out selling other eBook readers doesn't make it "enormously popular"; how many of these have actually sold?
It doesn't seem that the eBook market has really expanded to the point of anything yet being worthy of the "enormously popular" status, AFAIK.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I wonder how this will affect their deal with Sony and their ebook store. It's not like they can just take their toys and go home, as there's probably a contract or two, but I'm sure no one would mind replacing the awful Sony store interface.
Seriously! My g/f has a Kindle, and she has about thousand of books for it. She maybe "bought" a handful of those.
Games take up few Gigs and people pirate those. Movies take up hundreds of MBs and people pirate those. You think they won't pirate a TXT file that's few MBs in size?
I want an eBook device that can read the eBooks I already bought and own.
They are in PDF and some on CHM format.
If I am going to spend $300 or more for an eBook device I might as well buy a Netbook that can use PDF and CHM formats for the same price.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
...it will only sell unfinished books
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Buying an eBook reader always seemed impractical to me when you have so many decent smartphones and PDA devices out on the market. Granted, an eBook reader has a larger screen and may be more comfortable to hold, but for the price tag, you could just purchase a better mobile phone and have more features ready at your fingertips. Not to mention the advantage of portability.
Bottom of Slashdot page:
Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them. -- Dumas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knight_of_Sainte-Hermine
The Last Cavalier (originally published in France in 2005 under the title Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine) is an unfinished historical novel by Alexandre Dumas. It is believed to be Dumas' last major work, and the story was lost until 2005, when it was announced that an almost-complete copy had been found in the form of a newspaper serial. While a number of his previously forgotten works have been unearthed, this is the largest at 900 pages.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
As long as its a proper program, which can be download on its own, without having to be forced to install services and other bloated crap on your system.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer.
It seems to me cheaper and more efficient for the publisher of a book (or the author himself) to provide downloads directly.
For physical products, it makes sense to provide some kind of middleman to take care of the hassles involved with delivering the product; but for electronic products, it's not at all obvious to me why such a middleman is necessary.
As an author, I'm still struggling with the question of whether to make electronic versions of my books available; but if were to do so, (and especially having carefully read the contract that Amazon makes you sign to make your work available for the Kindle) I wouldn't be inclined to insert another profit-making entity between me and my readers.
I have been buying ebooks directly from the publisher Baen: www.baen.com For 4 years now. There prices are reasonable $7.99 for a typical release of book that is available in hard cover or 5.99 for a book that is available in paper back. They release the books in multiple formats including HTML. So the books that I bought 4 years ago and read with my palm I can now download again to my iphone and continue to read it. The prices are reasonable so I do not even think about looking for alternative sources for the book *cough bittorrent cough* I have been extremely happy with there products. I just wish other publishers would follow suit so I can continue buying ebooks of other authors that I enjoy. Curiously I just sent an email to Amazon.ca early today at how (since I am in Canada) I cannot get the kindle app or kindle books and how I have not bought any books from them for 4 years because I only buy ebooks. Well everyone says that the customer should decide and I have decided to only buy books as ebooks and I prefer without drm; baen meets those requirements so they get my business and thus far they are my sole source of fantasy/science fiction books that I have bought in the last 4 years.
With the DOJ and possibly the EU looking into googles book settlement for antitrust reasons, consumers will not be better off if the settlement is allowed to stand. They never are when dealing with a monopoly.
If google enters the market as a fair competitor to amazon, then sure, it should lead to lower prices and more choice, but I don't think google is even remotely interested in fair competition.
Format war?
PDF wins. It's free, implemented on all platforms, and does everything you need. It even does Javascript, which nobody needs.
Well, that was a fun war. Let's fight video formats now.
We won't see a real format war until typesetting becomes a prevalent aspect of ebook publishing.
along the right side of each page in the ebook.... yep "ads by google" :D
Kindle has no future, here is why:
By the time Kindle become popular, the cost of tablet PCs will be much lower than what it is today.
Why buy a ebook reader when you can get a full featured tablet pc, same size, low price.
No, we will see a format war once Amazon has to start considering implementing ePub on the Kindle (because they can no longer ignore other stores, that only carry their books in ePub or DRMed mobi (which doesn't work on the Kindle, because its mobi DRM implementation is different from the standard mobi implementation, even though they own Mobipocket. Can you spell "lock-in"?), or because they want to be able to sell books to people who don't own a Kindle.
Anyway, ePub can technically already do typesetting, as far as that goes in reflowable formats, through CSS. Mobipocket's typesetting possibilities suck. The format is outdated, and although it can be upgraded, it should just go the way of the dodo.
That said, for any book requiring footnotes (endnotes work in ePub), you will need PDF, as I know of no other format that will display them. Reflowable footnotes would be really neat, and are technically possible in ePub, but there is no working implementation yet.
Some of the books I've bought on my Kindle have clearly had their typography specified. Alberto Manguel's "The Library At Night" was set in a sans-serif font, maybe Optima. And Peter L. Bernstein's "Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story Of Risk" somehow managed to have a typeface that looked like it had been printed on a press with worn plates - occasional letters were malformed as if they had too little or too much ink. An 'A' on one screen might be a little wrong, but not every 'A' on every page, as would be the case if the problem were with the font.
It actually matched the paperback pretty well - perhaps they were both produced from a scan of a hardcover. Wasn't the best reading experience, however.
I don't know what kind of format they used to get that level of detail.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
PDF is a terrible format for ebooks. It's designed to instruct a printer how to draw on paper of a specifc, fixed size. An ebook format needs to deal with different screen sizes (possibly wildly different - I read ebooks on my 1280x800 laptop screen and my 177x220 phone screen) and different text sizes (my long-sighted father is going to want larger text in his ebooks than I do). PDF doesn't allow for the kind of reflow that a good ebook reader is going to employ.
For my money, the 10" netbooks plus FBreader makes a great book reader. (Add Sage and you have a great offline dictionary too)
I'll keep my non-drm text file books and my Chuwi 7" PMP media player. There's a good Ebook app out for it and with a 7" screen plus the ability to play a ton of music formats and video formats up to 720p with TV out for $120 I'm happy.
wasn't this announced like two years ago, when they had legal issues about it.
The best change I can imagine for eBooks would be more DRM-free publishers. The only reason I even buy eBooks is that I discovered Fictionwise legitimately sold many of their eBooks DRM-free. But many publishers still don't allow it, and that is what I'd like to see change.
Beneficial to many consumers? Healthy competition? Maybe in the short run, but what about the pending Book Search settlement? If that gets approved in its current form, Google gets exclusive access to scan and digitize millions of orphan works. Even if the settlement eventually gets cut back somewhat, Google has an enormous head start in its catalog from the books it's scanned already. Is there any doubt that the eBook format it chooses to market this huge selection of digital books will easily crush all other competitors? TFA seems to suggest that Google is planning on selling these eBooks only in cooperation with publishers and not from its settlement spoils at the moment, but given the potential to leverage the settlement monopoly to monopolize the market for eBooks and eReaders, I would be pretty surprised if this announcement doesn't pique the interest of the Justice Department.
Android...
I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off...
The original article seem to focus entirely on a Amazon vs Google battle. But in that article is missing one point: Kindle is not available outside the US. That is: you need an USA registered Credit Card with a USA address to buy one. Yes there are work around - but why should I support a flawed business model.
So for me living outside the US I had to look else where for for eBooks. And if you do you will soon notice that there are better eBook reader then Kindle and that there are better eBook shops then Amazon. Amazon is largely capitalising there good name here. In fact currently it is more like Amazon vs the rest of the world.
For me there is no doubt who is going to win in the long run. While USA is a large marked but it does only represent 5% of human population. Well, unless Amazon changes there business model that is.
Amazon is not the only eBook store in existence. And while Amazon is a international company there eBooks are only sold in the the US. You should consider other eBook stores. I suggest Fictionwise.
Well, I take it you mean 85% of the market Amazon targets. But Kindle only sells in the US. But you know what: We living outside the US are not an-alphabets! We can read as well. I would guess that Google will go for the World market. And there Kindle becomes unimportant.
I say screw these fancy formats. For novels, give me TXT any day, period. HTML tops (and that only for italic, since TXT can do line breaks and paragraphs just fine). A novel should not need more than plain text (and perhaps italics) to get its message across. But in the eventuality that something more fancy is needed, I see no reason for anything more than RTF. PDF tops, for stuff that needs perfect typesetting and images.
I'd much rather set my own font type and size, depending on whatever factors are relevant for me (eyesight, reader screen size etc.) And reader software will have a much simpler time wrapping and reflowing plain text or simple HTML.
I see no need for any other format. Yes, that means screw DRM. Tough luck, publishers. Give me cheap plain text books easy to find and buy in one place and I'll give you my money. How much depends only on how many books you can throw at me and how fast I can read them. You don't wanna? Fine, I'll get them free off the net and you can kiss my ass.
Has anyone noticed a small thing called stanza? Or maybe the store that started of the whole thing back in the 90s, fictionwise and the palm reader? Small device (then palm now iphone) == eBook happiness...
"Wouldn't the Kindle be more analogous to the iPod?"
That IS what he said:
"I never used iTunes because it didn't run on my OS, and it had DRM...The Kindle is exactly analogous. It has a proprietary format, with DRM."
I use PDFs as e-book content 4+ hours a day for my research, I have no trouble with it on my 42inch 1080P display, my 14inch 768 display my 10inc 1024 X 600 or my 3.5 420x380 display.
Having a set size with no ability to zoom in on text and out on graphs, on the other hand, makes for an entirely useless product no matter what document format is being used.
Are they getting ready to complete with Stanza on the iPhone by releasing an ebook app for the Android? Stanza, incidently, has just been purchased by Amazon.
I forgot to mention: If you capitalising your good name then you have less "good name" afterwards:
http://www.mobipocket.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15520
Only one example of an article I did myself - If you look true the forum you will find several dozed similar articles.
The problem is that both the Shop and the Publisher need to agree on DRM free. I know of at least one publisher which does not insist on DRM yet Mobipocket.com still add DRM to the books anyway. Of course Mobipocket is owned by Amazon which might explain it. And yes: Amazon has more then one eBook store.
I see you have not followed the scene. Otherwise you would know that Amazon is the evil one here who did not enters the market as a fair competitor.
Amazons evil master plan is of course is bog standard: buy the competition (Mobipocket, Stanza) and the Embrace (Kindle file format is the same as Mobipocket), Extent (with a useless "Read on Kindle / Mobipocket only flag) and Extinguish (don't create new Mobipocket software and wait for the hardware to become obsolete). Kim Possibles Dr.D has more inspiring plans.
Anyway: I as a European - who can not even buy Kindle - welcome any stiff competition to Amazon.
Actually the Kindle and Mobipocket format and DRM is the same save for a "read in Kindle / Mobipocket only" flag. Google "Kindle Mobipocket conversion" for details.
Of course this only supports your "Vendor-Lock-In" argument and Mobipocket will soon go the way of the Dodo since Amazon halted development of new readers. Now they only have to wait for the hardware to become obsolete.
But does not do reflow which is needed for ultra portable devices - like mobile phones.
In theory you are right but in praxis there are two thing to consider:
1) not all publishers have contracts with all eBook shops.
2) not all shops carry all file formats.
With my particular example with VPM [1] and Perry Rhodan [2] the net result is that you can get DRM free PDF from one Shop and DRM infected Mobipocket from other Shops. PDF is not suitable for ultra portable devices (i.E. Smart phones) and Mobipocket is dying out. And also not all shops offer subscriptions. After readers have issued concerns VPM is now looking for new eBook options when subscriptions renews are due for issue 2500.
My favourite option option would be Fictionwise multiformat [3]. But that particular combination might fail because VPM is a German publisher and Fictionswise is USA based eBook store.
Martin
PS: note that outside the US we are pretty pissed of with Amazon in general and Kindle in particular.
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pabel-Moewig
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
[3] http://forum.perryrhodan.net/index.php?showtopic=17183