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Google to launch online e-book store
By siliconindia
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Friday, 16 October 2009, 20:21 IST
Frankfurt: Google plans to launch an online platform, to sell electronic books to any device that has a Web browser, including smart phones, netbooks and personal computers and laptops, putting Google in competition with Amazon's Kindle. Google will host the e-books and make them searchable.
Readers will be able to buy e-books either from Google directly or from other online stores such as Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com. The Web search giant said that it would launch Google Editions in the first half of next year, initially offering about half a million e-books in partnership with publishers with whom it already cooperates where they have digital rights. According Tom Turvey, Head of Google Book Search's publisher partnership program, the e-book market is evolving to allow access of books from anywhere and from any device. He also added that the price per book would be set by their publishers and would start with between 400,000 to 600,000 books next year.
Also, technology research firm Forrester expects about three million e-readers to be sold in the U.S. this year, from a previous base of about one million, helped by lower prices, more content and better distribution.
