Heard whats the next move of Google? Google announced that its would open a digital bookstore which would start selling e-books very soon.
The announcement was made by Chris Palma the manager for strategic partner development at an event that after years in development Google Editions would go live in late June or July. The Google e-book store would be called as Google Editions. This would add a big name among the running crowded e-book market competitors currently dominated by players like Amazon, Nobel, Barns and new entrant like Apple recently.
Google already have a nice platform i.e., Google Book Search, so using this they would be integrating it with e-book store allowing users to buy electronic copies of books through Google book search results. Google Edition would be available on a number of devices including Android mobile operating system. Book retailers will be able to sell Google Editions on their own sites through revenue sharing model. Google hasn’t yet confirmed whether they will allow publishers to set the price of the book as Apple allows.
As announced by Google this ebook would be able to read through a web browser and so this would be threat to the success of devices especially designed to read e-books such as Amazon’s Kindle. As Apple book store is new which is released when the iPad tablet device was released last month, it could be a tough competition.
I am pretty sure most publishers will be quick to sign up to google store, if only to try an give Amazon a bloody nose an to stop them from dominating the market like apple has done with the music market.
In some ways publishers are the most outdated media off all but they seem to be the only one embracing the future technology rather than fighting against it like most of the other areas of media are, like the music an film industries.