Google Launching Its Own E-Book Store

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E-books have become fairly popular recently thanks to the Amazon Kindle, iPad and various other E-readers. As a result we’ve also had a whole load of E-book stores popping up. The likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple’s iBooks are the main stores……..for now at least. Google have now announced their entry into the E-Book market.

Set to launch in June or July, Google editions is poised to take on the likes of Amazon and Apple. While Google have been looking into ways to sell books online, this is the first proper step. It’s nothing like the current Google Books service that they have on offer which just has out of date books.

And how do Google hope to distinguish themselves from the rest? Well they hope they will get the edge over the others by allowing any web connected device to access the books, instead of being limited to just one specific piece of hardware etc…Google are saying that there will be 500,000 titles available at launch which will be available to any web connected device. Online books are cached once you’ve loaded them, so they can also be viewed offline.

Publishers will get 63 percent of the revenue from book sales and Google takes the rest. Other online retailers, such as independent bookstores, can also open their own satellite versions of Google Editions, giving a small fee to Google and 45 percent of revenue to publishers, and taking the rest. Which sounds like a fairly reasonable deal for publishers. Google are still debating wheather or not they will set the price or if they will let the publishers decide.

Still no word on what publishers will be available but I’m fairly sure Google will manage to get most of the big names on their side. Of course this will put even more pressure on the already failing high street book stores, but more importantly it might encourage a bit more competition online. Expect to see a bit of a price war in the near future.

However how will Google deliver the books? Only through a web browser? Or will we have dedicated Google Edition apps for E-books?

What do you think?

Let us know in the comments

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