Google to Launch Digital Books by Early Summer
Google Inc. will begin selling digital books in late June or July, a company representative said Tuesday, setting off a three-way battle between the Internet giant and Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. — Chris Palma, Google's manager …
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch has been a long time coming: The Times reported back in January 2007 on Google's plot for an e-books business, and the project has since been tangled in the revised digital books settlement that Google has been negotiating with authors and publishers since September 2009. A February 2009 partnership putting books on cellphones alongside Amazon showed the two companies could cooperate — this announcement turns them into direct retail rivals.
The timing is pointed: Apple entered the e-book market weeks ago with iBooks on the iPad, and Google's stated late-June/July window positions it as the third major storefront. PC World's coverage emphasizes the differentiator — Google Editions is built around the browser rather than a dedicated device, a contrast with Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad ecosystems.
First-order effects
- Google moves from book search and scanning into direct retail sales by late June or July, per company manager Chris Palma, putting it head-to-head with Amazon's Kindle store and Apple's just-launched iBookstore.
- Publishers gain a third major retail channel at scale, reducing their dependence on the two incumbent platforms for digital distribution.
Second-order effects
- Amazon and Apple now face an entrant whose reading experience runs in any browser, attacking the device-lock-in that underpins both the Kindle hardware franchise and iPad content bundling.
- With three competing storefronts, pricing and revenue-split terms for publishers become a live bargaining lever rather than a two-player convention.
Third-order effects
- If browser-based access holds, book retail shifts from device-tethered ecosystems toward cloud libraries tied to accounts instead of hardware — a structural change regulators and publishers' settlement negotiations will have to keep pace with.
The trend: Digital book selling is consolidating around a few giant platform owners while simultaneously loosening from dedicated devices toward account-based, browser-accessed libraries.