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Google Set To Tackle eBook Market

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the as-long-as-i-get-to-download-scanned-content-too dept.

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."

20 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Obvious next step... by Newander · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Obvious next step... by Red+Flayer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Google is not a hardware company. I'd look for an API and not much else.

      Came here to say something like this.

      Since it's already been said, let me clarify:

      Google will not make a proprietary e-book reader. They want their wares on as many machines as possible. Whether it's firmware, applications, 'appliances', or whatever. Eyeballs == data == better targeting of ads == higher profits on ad sales.

      Releasing an e-book reader themselves pitches them squarely against the very companies they want to be using their wares, to enable them to sling ads to everyone.

      Google is an advertising behemoth. For all the neat-o things they produce and we use, they exist to make money by slinging ads at people. Every business move they make should be considered in light of the fact that they will choose the route that nets them the most eyeballs -- and in this case, this means making an API or firmware for other companies to use. They do not want to alienate ad targets who use other e-book readers.

      --
      "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
    2. Re:Obvious next step... by fafaforza · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The whole "can't you get a netbook instead" thing has been beaten to death, twice, with a dead horse tossed on top the second time. I mean, seriously. People have suggested this, the iPhone, the Nintendo DS, etc. Yeah, yeah, they do oh-so-much more. Different products. If you can read for extended periods of time on an LCD, and have a place to recharge it conveniently, then get a netbook.

      The rest of us will enjoy immitation printed paper, with weeks between charging.

    3. Re:Obvious next step... by ubrgeek · · Score: 4, Informative

      Outstanding. The screen is great, the battery life is outstanding and the form factor is remarkably comfortable. Frankly, that's a huge difference between the Kindle and a netbook. The Kindle is designed for one thing and that's reading for long periods of time. Netbooks aren't. I'm curious how many people who insist "a netbook can do it and its cheaper and no DRM and and and" have ever actually held a Kindle to see just how important the form factor component really is. Frankly, I don't care that I can read the books on my iPhone (another device people are saying is a good alternative.) I've done that and other than being able to sync where I am in the book between my Kindle and iPhone, I don't enjoy the experience nor do I find reading on the phone as relaxing or comfortable. I don't care about DRM issues. There are plenty of free books out there and I tend to buy books rather than going to the library, so if I was going to buy them anyway, then buying them for a device that I own and like isn't really a big deal to me. (Whether that point of sale is at Amazon or Google.) I don't need a netbook. I bought a kindle because I needed something that I could read for hours at a time and not have to worry about recharging the thing every 3-5 hours.

      --
      Bark less. Wag more.
    4. Re:Obvious next step... by WaywardGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is really, really, huge. We've had a number of articles on slashdot that clearly point out the danger Amazon poses to the e-book market. They're following an iTune-like model, with similar DRM, similarly ham-strung hardware, and they're waging a war to control e-book distribution. Google has the muscle to turn the tide in this battle, and to open the e-book market to many players, not just Amazon and Sony.

      Consider an Amazon Kindle vs an Eee PC. The Eee PC has a bigger screen, costs less, has real wifi, and is a freaking great e-book reader. The only problem? F**king Amazon and Sony have locked up rights to distribute many of the most popular e-books. Screw e-book readers, IMO. Netbooks running a real OS (Ubuntu in my case) is the way to go. E-book readers like the Kindle are just another trap for us to fall into, where we lose choice, and pay outrageous prices for massively limited hardware and software, just so we can read the book we actually want to buy.

      --
      Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
    5. Re:Obvious next step... by mgblst · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The rest of us will enjoy immitation printed paper, with weeks between charging.

      No, some of you will enjoy that, the rest of us will enjoy reading a good old fashioned book.

    6. Re:Obvious next step... by bemymonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And what about the battery life? The fact that the Netbook probably weighs twice as much? The free WWAN connection you get with the Kindle? Seamless integration with Amazon's eBook store? How about booting up the laptop (or even waking it from sleep), entering your password and opening the eBook every time you want to read a paragraph or two on the bus? As a matter of fact, don't you think most people would look at you pretty strangely if you pulled out a netbook on a bus? :p

      Sure, you can use a netbook as an eBook reader (I do, at least for large PDFs and other crap my smartphone can't handle), but it's always a bit of a hack. If you're only planning on reading in places where you'd have your netbook out anyway, I guess it's not a problem - but for people who like to read in the back of a taxi or in the john or on the bus, pulling out a netbook every time is just plain annoying.

  2. Cost by nurb432 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 ----
    1. Re:Cost by DeadDecoy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      At 400$ a kindle, laptops start to look a little more attractive, especially with emerging tech like color eink and olpc's use of eink in screens to lengthen their battery life. I would love to buy a kindle, but its not cost-effective for me, and better products seem right around the corner.

    2. Re:Cost by sabernet · · Score: 4, Informative

      Ummm...no.

      Kindle doesn't work outside the US, period. We Canadians don't get it either(though I suspect that has something to do with our world-renowned awful telcos and monopolistic nationally propped up book broker Indigo more then anything else.)

    3. Re:Cost by Cymurgh · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There must be some business logic to Amazon's confining their ebook sales to their own format, their own device, their own network, and their own home country. Don't know what it is though.

      I'd be buying my ebooks from Amazon if I possibly could. But I can't. They don't distribute over the Internet so I can't download to my preferred device. They don't make Whispernet available outside the US so there's no incentive for me to ditch my preferred device for a Kindle.

  3. Really? by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Really? by Eil · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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?

      Amazon hasn't released any numbers on how many were sold. However, I frequently use the Mom Scale to informally gauge the popularity of a given technology. How it works is like this: if my 65-year-old mom has heard of a piece of technology, then it's popular. If she has purchased or downloaded a piece of technology, then it's enormously popular.

      I found out yesterday that my mom just bought a Kindle, hence the Kindle is enormously popular.

  4. As it will be forever a beta... by mr_lizard13 · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...it will only sell unfinished books

    --
    "We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
  5. Re:This is like... by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Who cares about switching? Amazon went for new users.

    Yep. I never used iTunes because it didn't run on my OS, and it had DRM (light DRM, but DRM nevertheless). The first time I ever bought music online was from Amazon, and now I'm buying all my music on Amazon. All Amazon had to do to get my business was to offer me the opportunity to pay my money in return for an mp3 file, which nobody else was willing to let me do.

    The Kindle is exactly analogous. It has a proprietary format, with DRM. Google says they want to have a format that works on a variety of devices, which presumably means no DRM. If they execute the idea well, I'll probably buy my first electronic book from Google.

    --
    Find free books.
  6. Re:Not too happy with my Kindle by Red+Flayer · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, you misread the ending. I read the same book.

    [SPOILER ALERT]

    The killer's name really was Low Battery.

    Low had tried to frame his brother the rapper, 9V. But the power required to electrocute the victim was too high -- and 9V demonstrated he had full charge by having the detective place both his contacts on his tongue. While 9V lost a lot of street cred for getting tongued by a male detective, it did show that he was fully-charged and quite innocent.

    So then Low Battery tried to frame his sister, Anita Agatha Battery, but AA Battery simply didn't have the brute power necessary for the job.

    Out of blood relatives (and it had to be one of the siblings, as established by DC-NA testing), by process of elimination, it was Low Battery who depleted his power by committing the electrocution, with terminal results.

    So sorry. That last pun was just over the top.

    --
    "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
  7. baen has no drm by rico33 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Forget about proprietary eBook formats by fafaforza · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not sure why your post was modded Insightful as you've obviously haven't looked into this at all. Most eBook readers support unencrypted PDF. There are also conversion utilities to convert PDF for various ebook formats so that your device doesn't have to do the formatting on the fly.

    I see that there's a CHM to HTML conversion app (Mac only it seems, and another commercial one), and with the HTML in hand, you can create an ePub book using a program called Calibre.

    It's pretty messy as far as formats and conversion utilities right now, and you have to sort a lot of it out, but there are ways to read your stuff which shouldn't be too difficult for a techie.

  9. PDF is a print format by Homburg · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. No Kindle outside the US by krischik · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.