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Google Takes On Amazon With Own E-Book Store
CWmike writes "Google announced on Thursday that next year it's launching an online e-book store called Google Editions where users will be able to buy digital books that can be read on a range of gadgets, including e-book readers, laptops, and cell phones. Press reports out of Germany, where it was announced, note that Google plans to offer up half a million e-books from the get-go. Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said, 'The market leader, Amazon, built its position with a closed device, Kindle, which is limited to reading and buying eBooks. It will be interesting to see how well it stacks up against Google's strategy of delivering e-book capabilities via the Web to any device that can connect to the Internet. This gives Google a vastly larger addressable market than what Amazon has built up with Kindle so far.'" The price per book will be set by the publishers, Google says. Google willl turn over 45% of what they take in to the publisher and "the vast majority" of the rest to retailers.
I don't understand why they would be paying "the vast majority" (of whats left after paying the publisher) to retailers?
I haven't read the article yet, but either the summary is way off, misleading, or it just doesn't make sense!
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
What they charge per book matters. I am not sure how many people you are going to get to buy an e-book for the same price that they could pick up a physical copy at their local book store or less if they bought it used on amazon. I am going to hold judgment until I see some prices.
As have I, it sucks compared to a 6" EPD. Backlight displays are a tremendous strain on the eyes compared to purely reflective displays. And the points on an E Ink device are distributed more like print than the matrix of an LCD, so I never get a moire pattern after image on my eyes after a long reading session. (yes, I doubt you believe any of this.)
Companies are making EPD based readers and accepting the tremendous limitations of the techonlogy not because it's a gimmick but because LCDs have terrible battery life and are just painful to read. My mind boggles that you think a color LCD is superior, the color elements are pretty easy to see on a typical handheld sized LCD and with fields of white can be extremely annoying to look at. If anything, the high resolution the monochrome LCDs are the next best choice, like on a Japanese electronic dictionary. The pixels are closer together and you don't have weird repeating stripes of red, blue and green.
Maybe I'm just biased, having made ebook readers for years now.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Amazon has done some interesting research and development lately. In particular, look at Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform, as well as Amazon's statistically improbable phrases (SIP) algorithm. I have a fetish for natural language parsing, so SIP is particularly interesting to me. These are innovations.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
Yeah I read that too, but am still concerned why would you have to access it the first time via a browser? This might indicate that you're not really able to download a full copy as a single (non-DRM'd) file that you could put on another (browserless) e-book reader. Rather that you have to rely on some Google-supplied plugin to read an encrypted mess from your browser cache.
The web browser thing makes sense to me given Google's app layout so far. I doubt you'll be buying a file at all. Instead, you'll probably get another tab on your Google area (akin to Documents, Photos, Reader, etc there are there now), and once you purchase access to a book it'll get tied to your account where you can read it online.
There's still some degree of vendor locking in that all your books would be on their servers, but at least there's no device lock-in.
I've certainly used a variety of devices to read ebooks though. I read The Wizard of Oz (admittedly a short book) on my iPod Touch because it was in a collection of public domain books I bought off the app store for $0.99.
I've read several books on my desktop computer at work, simply because when you have nothing to do, looking at PDF's still looks like you're working. My boss thinks I'm diligently reading something technical while in reality I'm reading "The Time Machine" or some other sci-fi novel :).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I actually like O'Reilly's Safari site for my eBooks. It's accessible to my iPhone as well as my various systems. As a consultant, it works better than dragging books around and the books are available for download. It's also very readable as each chapter is a single "page" vs many reference books I have are multi-column.
Having a similar Google site where the books are available whereever I am assuming 'net access plus it's off-line so I can read it when I'm out of range sounds a lot better than the Kindle at least for my purposes.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
It turns out that starting probably next year some time, you get the best of both worlds. We'll have netbooks and net tablets that pack displays equal to e-paper in sunlight, and with brilliant color.
Personally, I translate e-books to high-speed audio (about 500 wpm), rather than reading, as my central vision is failing. I can't tell you how much I enjoy having books read to me at that speed with the old IBM ViaVoice TTS. The problem with Kindle and friends is they make it too hard or impossible for me to enjoy their books in the form I want. I have high hopes that netbooks with the new displays coupled with Googles e-book service will change the world.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
The summary mentioned Google will be going up against Kindle owners but didn't mention the Kindle app for iPhone.
As of August 31 2009 the Kindle app for the iPhone was the 4th most popular app in the App Store, with estimates of 3 million Kindle for iPhone users out there.
Google will be going against this as well as Stanza and the B&N ebook readers. Apparently there's a rather large market for ebooks on the iPhone/iPod touch.