Google Takes On Amazon With Own E-Book Store 152
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.
DRM sux (Score:3, Funny)
At least upgrade to Mosaic [floodgap.com]. I'm just disappointed that Google isn't available on Gopher [floodgap.com], and I can read ebooks just fine as plain text, this is how we've been doing it for many many years and the format Project Gutenberg started out using. Some people even host their blogs [quux.org] on gopher.
Re:amazon vs. Google (Score:3, Funny)
Amazon just makes its shareholders rich.
Did I miss the headline where Google bought back all outstanding shares and converted itself into a non-profit corporation?