New edition
Google will finally launch its commercial e-book service in late June or early July, according to the WSJ, which was at a publishing industry event where Google made the announcement.
This will mark the culmination of the highly controversial scanning and online storing of thousands of books by Google, which is still being legally contested by some rights-holders and regulatory authorities. Assuming Google sorts these last legal challenges out, it looks set to become another major player in the digital books market.
The service will be called Google Editions and, apart from books that will be made available uniquely through Google, the differentiator looks likely to be openness. Right now most other offerings are proprietary - Amazon books are read on a Kindle, Apple ones on the iPad - while Google Editions will not only be viewable on multiple devices, Google will even allow third parties to sell them.
It looks set to be a browser-based cloud service, meaning it doesn't matter what device you're using and, once bought, a book would be accessible from several devices. We assume even things like bookmarking will be done through the cloud. Of course, there will need to be an off-line capability to the service too.
This model creates an interesting problem for the proprietary e-book players like Amazon, but especially Apple. With all the grief Apple is getting over the changes to its SDK to block apps developed on platforms like adobe Flash, can it really afford to be seen to block other services like Google Editions on devices like the iPad.
With Apple currently considered the evil monopolist du jour, Google once more looks like the plucky Internet democratiser, opening-up a market currently dominated by companies that prefer closed, restrictive systems.
We wouldn't be surprised to see Google continue to release products that overlap with Apple offerings and effectively dare Apple to ban them. This will certainly happen if Google's AdMob acquisition is allowed to go through and Apple will have to tread carefully or it risks losing far more at the hands of regulators than it ever will to Google.
