Despite the fact that
nobody reads anything anymore, the ebook market sure is hot lately, with Barnes & Noble about to make some sort of big splash and now Google getting in on the action in a new way. After shaking up the industry quite a bit with its
Google Books initiative, Google is going to offer paid ebook purchases in its new "Google Editions" store in the first half of next year, which has been bumped back from the
2009 launch originally planned. The store will offer somewhere in the range of 400,000 and 600,000 books (compared to the 100,000ish offered by Sony and the 330,000+ on Kindle), and prices will be set by publishers, with Google collecting 55 percent of the profits and supposedly sharing much of that with "retail partners." The books will be available to any device with a web browser, but will be available offline after they've been accessed the first time -- that sounds like Google Gears to us, but since phones and other devices are mentioned for compatibility, hopefully there's more to it than just a browser-based reader.
posted Oct 15th 2009 11:11AM
i didn't bother reading this article after i read the first line "Despite the fact that nobody reads anything anymore".
bite my shiny metal a$$
- bender
What was this article about? I didn't even bother reading it...
I don't know, as I didn't read the buttons necessary to click to this page.
why do these replies make sense?
or I can just use the PDF file for the ebook on my phone...
Really. I never wanted to buy books.. why would I buy ebooks?
So, you've recognized that you're not in the target demographic. Bravo.
Want a cookie?
Google already has an ebook reader for Google Books on the iPhone (and assumedly Android). Not much change needed to open it to "Editions" - right?
I don't get free ebook from Google by seeing 3 lines of ads on each page of the ebook? What have this world become?
I Think it's Google's Initiative to take over the world.
>hopefully there's more to it than just a browser-based reader.
That's all it is.
funny.
i think you misrepresented the number of books available from Sony.
After all, they already have the Google eBooks available for direct download in the Sony eBook Store.
From this page:http://ebookstore.sony.com/google-ebooks/
"Together with Google, Sony brings you access to over a million public domain books for free. Now you can search, browse, and read over a million public domain books preserved by the world's great libraries on your Sony Reader"
so i would guess the number is a bit higher than 100,000 after all...........
Sony has 100,000 titles *for sale*. Google will have 400,000 to 600,000 titles *for sale*. And if they manage to work out a settlement on the Google Books deal that allows them to sell copies of the orphaned works that they've scanned, they'll probably gain close to an order of magnitude on that number, putting them way ahead of their competitors.
except you forgot to include that Google will be including their public domain books in the store and they are part of the number being represented here.
"Today, Google said it will launch its own e-book store in the first half of 2010 called "Google Editions." This store will sell in-print books in addition to its archive of public domain titles, and will be accessible to "any device with a Web browser," not just for the dedicated e-readers that have gained so much notoriety in the past few years."
400,000 to 600,000 public-domain crap, not books. Most of those have never been printed books. Heck, many don't even qualify as a "book" - there are some old magazine ads in there! Sure, there are some good old classic public-domain books, but you can already get those in digital format for free from other sources (like the Gutenberg library). Right now Amazon is in the eBook lead with 330,000 *real* books.
sorta off topic:
seeing that there appears to be increasing interest in e-readers, w/kindle, google store, etc, i would guess the rumored apple tablet (if it does exist) will actually be their version of an e-reader. along w/a bookstore added to itunes. im sure that'd be an easier product to develop than a fully designed tablet pc. plus an e-book would further increase apples market, more than a tablet would
Oh no you mentioned Apple. May God have mercy on your soul. The resident PC heads are on a rampage because someone had the nerve to say Windows 7 is still Windows...
bool Success;
if (can be downloaded in ePub and/or Kindle format) {
Success = true;
} else {
Success = false;
}
return Success;
HaHaHa!!!! Maybe I am just weird enough to get this.
C'mon, seriously just give us a store that sells books in plan TXT format $5 a pop, I'll be happy to start buying books there. No DRM, can read on almost any device. What's so hard about doing this?!!
Non-DRM text files would be pirated so hard and fast it'd make your head spin. It's a nice idea, and I'd like to see it myself, but there's no way it's going to happen any time soon. Maybe, years from now, when the ebook market has matured a lot, we might see something like this.
I'll buy an ebook reader when they have a decent amount of books.
Even our university library has 4.5 Million books in their shelves and vaults. The national library around the corner is a whole other story.
Why I settle for less?
Perhaps because you can't house an entire library of 4.5M books in your pocket? Perhaps because - regardless of how many books that exist in the library, only a very small percentage of them are actually relevant for you?
But hell, if it makes you buy an ereader, I'm sure someone out there can generate 22M titles of gramatically correct randomly generated sentences and then it would be 5 times better than your local library because it has 5 times more titles?
if japanese is a duble bite language does this mean that google japan will be selling 800,000 to 1,200,000 books? is my math correct? duh. i want to read google japanese yakuza weekly magazines in the clouds. ほら！馬鹿野郎てめぇ！ (笑う）