"All of your library is there at anytime; any device you pick up, all your books are present," James Crawford, the director of engineering on the Google Books team, told Reuters in an interview ahead of Monday's announcement.
Well, apparently not any device. You can read ebooks purchased in Google eBooks on the iPad, Nook, Sony Reader and about 85 different devices, but not on Amazon's Kindle. According to the Google's store " currently, Google eBooks are not compatible with Amazon Kindle devices, though we are open to supporting them in the future."
At first I thought it's part of Google's effort to fight Amazon's current dominance in the ebook market, but after reading Doug Pardee's comment below, I'm wondering if it might be Amazon that is blocking this relationship. What do you think?
In any case, I think it doesn't make much sense for Google, as the Kindle has the biggest market share in the eBook market right now. So my guestimation is that very soon this is going to change and the Kindle devices will join the rest of the rest of the devices on Google's list, unless of course Amazon won't mind to keep this status quo will see it as an advantage for them. We'll have to wait and see.
The video clip below explains more about Google's new
ebook store:
Google launched earlier today its new and anticipated online bookstore - Google eBooks. According to Reuters, the new store is featuring 3 million titles, from newly released best-sellers to freely available out-of-copyright books, which consumers can store in a personal online library managed by Google and then read on any device.Google eBooks.
2 comments:
It's not "part of Google's effort to fight Amazon's current dominance in the ebook market", it's Amazon's defiant stance that Kindle owners aren't permitted to buy e-books from anyone but Amazon.
Amazon also takes the converse view: they won't sell e-books to anyone who doesn't have a Kindle or Kindle app. Amazon intentionally holds itself apart from the rest of the e-book world by using only a proprietary e-book format (actually, two of them).
Until Kindle either supports the Adobe EPUB format that almost everybody else, including Google eBooks, is using, or until Amazon permits other booksellers to sell e-books in Kindle's AZW and/or Topaz formats, Amazon/Kindle will continue to be an isolated fortress in the e-book world.
Actually, I bought a Google eBook today and read it on my Kindle 3g Web browser.
I'm describing it on my blog article, which is almost finished, but I wanted to include your earlier article today...
- Andrys
kindleworld.blogspot.com
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