Mountain View, California — According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, search engine titan Google’s long awaited invasion into the world of impending e-books store now has an official launch date: The end of the year. Google Editions, is finally nearing launch with a release coming at some point during the month of December.
This comes after a series of intermissions that began all the way back in May. According to reports, anticipated Google Editions ebook store to go live latest by July. But WSJ reported that Google recently cleared several technical and legal obstacles delaying Google Editions’ ebook store launch.
Company executives now informed WSJ that the store, which is being called Google Editions, will launch in the U.S. by the end of December and will debut globally during the first quarter of 2011.
Scott Dougall, a Google product management director, also confirmed Google Editions will be unleashed in the U.S. later this month and offer international services by Q1 of 2011. The search engine leader said the launch was suspended because they “did not want to come out with something that was not thorough.”
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It should be noted that Google Editions is altogether a separate venture than Google Book Search — Google’s attempt to digitize and sell out-of-print books. Google, the world’s most popular search engine, armed with Google Editions, is poised to take on such heavyweights of the online ebook market as Amazon, Apple’s iBookStore, and Barnes & Nobles. Early reports of Google Editions ebook store first appeared in October last year.
For those not acquainted with Editions, it is a service that is going to allow customers to purchase books that they find through not only Google’s Book Search but throughout the internet. That means that customers will be able to buy books directly from Google as well as through several online retailers including independent book stores.
After the purchase, users will be able to hoard those books away in a online library that is linked to one’s Google account. This makes Google Editions different from its competitors: Amazon’s ebook store, for example — Kindle users can only purchase ebooks from Amazon’s store.
Brian Murray, CEO of News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishing says that Editions is going to have greater advantage because “their technology may be the least dependent on specific devices.”
The company is working with book publishers to sell hundreds of thousands of e-books, according to the person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because details of the project have not been made public.
Besides, with Google’s meddling, each publisher is discussing different revenue-sharing arrangements, though all of them will keep the majority of money from each sale, the person said.
For instance, they will want to take advantage of the 190 million U.S. residents that visit Google on a monthly basis and two, they will have access to their own e-book store, an option that probably was not even an option before Editions.
The store, which the search engine proposes has said will feature more than 500,000 titles, will be device-agnostic, meaning that texts will be readable on any device with a browser. Consumers will be able to buy the electronic titles both on the Google Editions site, as well as on the sites of third-party retailers who are allowed to resell access.