Mountain View, California — In an attempt to compete with the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sellers of downloadable, digital books, search giant Google on Tuesday said it plans to begin selling e-books that people can read on any Internet-connected device including Apple’s hot-selling iPad tablet computers, earliest by this summer.
Chris Palma, Google’s manager for essential content development, disclosed the plan at a panel discussion in New York that was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, said the company would open its previously disclosed service called Google Editions that would enable users to buy e-books directly from the company, as well as through other retailers in June or July.
Palma unveiled the plan Tuesday at a book industry event in New York City, according to a published report in The Wall Street Journal. In addition to the main store, third-party book merchants and publishers will also be allowed to host Google Editions shops on their own sites, putting Google in a battle with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple, which recently unveiled its own e-books initiative for the iPad, the newspaper said.
No details were disclosed regarding the cost of the books or which publishers would participate in the project.
Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for Google, agreed that the Google Editions service was being slated for a launch sometime by the end of July and its virtual shelves would be loaded with in-print works with the authorization of publishers owning copyrights. The service would also be “device-agnostic” — meaning that any Internet-enabled device could download and read the books, he said.
Google has earlier mentioned that it expects to have about half-a-million publications available for download at the store’s launch. It is hoped that consumers would be able to download books from Google Editions onto PCs, as well as e-readers, smartphones, and other mobile devices.
Comparatively to the e-books from Amazon, which can be downloaded to Kindle format, Google Editions will be a browser based service. Users will be able to access cached version of their purchases offline, or through an app, but true to its roots, Google will keep your digital bookshelf stored in the cloud. This set-up has its benefits. For one, consumers would not have to worry about nettlesome DRM issues – Google Editions will work with your iPad, your HTC Droid Incredible, or your laptop.
Editions is independent from the contentious Google Book Search project to make all the world’s written works, including out-of-print titles, available online.
Such a move would bring another heavyweight contender to the increasingly competitive e-books market with Amazon.com and Apple. Amazon launched its Kindle e-reader in late 2007 and has since taken a commanding lead in the market.
Cupertino-based Apple rolled out its iPad tablet last month, along with its iBookstore service to sell e-books for the device. The company on Monday claimed that it has sold 1 million iPads and 1.5 million copies of e-books in the past month. Amazon has never released sales data for the Kindle.
“We believe in an open ecosystem where people can access and read books, whether at a computer, on their phone or electronic reader, or from their local library or bookshop,” Google Product Manager Brandon Badger said at the time.
But not everyone may be excited by Google’s plans for an online book store.
Groups comprising of artists and photographers and several individual creative professionals have filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming the search giant’s online book service violates content producers’ copyrights.
“Google is engaging in massive copyright infringement,” the plaintiffs alleged in papers filed last month in U.S. District Court in New York.
Google has forged deals with libraries at several top colleges, including Stanford and the Universities of California, Michigan, Virginia, and Wisconsin, to scan their entire collections and make them available online through its Google Books service. Google’s also entered similar deals with several book publishers.
Google is still awaiting a ruling by a US federal judge pondering the fate of a legal agreement with US authors and publishers that would clear the way for Book Search. But the photographers and illustrators whose works are included in the books say Google never got their permission to reproduce the images electronically.