The whole e-Book market which is just starting to get excited right now due to Amazon’s Kindle and various e-book readers that are coming out may soon be shaked up some more with the entry of an Internet giant. That giant of course is Google which just announced about is newest project – Google Editions.To put is simply, Google Editions is the search giant’s way of spoiling the party for Kindle and others who may be planning to get into the e-book craze which is just starting to pick up. According to various coverages, Google Editions is going to be an online store for delivering electronic books that can be read in any device using a web browser. Clearly, it’s a direct hit against Amazon’s Kindle and the Amazon’s e-Book business model wherein e-books can only be read from a single device.
Google Editions is planned for a 2010 availability and will initially offer 400,000 to 600,000 ebooks. Users will be able to buy e-books directly from Google or through its content partners. Now, here’s the interesting part. Once a user bought an e-book either from Google or from its partners, Google will store the books on its server where users can access it anytime.
To enable offline reading, Google Editions will also enable caching of the e-books on a users web browser.
Google Editions is not to come to fruition until 2010. But since Google is currently facing a book-related settlement issue, I can’t help but wonder whether this is an opportune time to announce about the Google Editions project. Google Editions and Google Books Project may be two distinct endeavors. But the fact that both are dealing with books make it prone to further controversies later on.
So what’s you take on this? How does reading the next Neil Gaiman novel on a netbook running on Google Chrome OS sound to you?
