Google’s much awaited eBook project has come to light. With over 3 million titles to read and buy from, Google eBooks is device agnostic. Google has come out with all guns blazing with its sleuth of apps for almost all the popular devices.
With the launch of eBooks, Google has opened up a potentially new market for the publishers. Publishers who have to choose between several book stores now have a open way of getting in to Google’s arms. That way they don’t have to worry about the hardware a book can be read on. Google eBooks is probably the first cloud based book reading solution which is being deployed on a grand scale. 3 million titles from 4000 publishers are available on the store.
It’s a shame that Google eBooks is available for the US only. Even the web edition is available for US only as there is no buy option anywhere. For travelers outside of US, Google’s apps support offline reading and the books can be pre-loaded on the devices. An Android app is ready for download as per the link here, iOS app is also ready for download – though tech blogs are reporting this as soon to be launched.
Google eBooks can be read on all popular eBook readers which support the ePub format. Google web browser edition provides a neat little interface to mimic the real book format. The pages flip like a breeze and with the full screen mode on, you can do some serious reading on the web.
Google though launched several products, it never challenged any incumbents in any business beyond the search engine. Is Google eBooks, Google’s ticket to challenge the incumbents? What would this mean to Amazon and Apple?
