Google today announced the launch of its previously-rumored eBookstore, bringing another significant competitor to the market targeted by major bookstore chains, Amazon’s Kindle Store, and Apple’s iBookstore. The new Google eBookstore currently offers over three million titles with “hundreds of thousands” of pay titles available.
We designed Google eBooks to be open. Many devices are compatible with Google eBooks – everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. With the new Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud. That means you can access your ebooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa – using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage.
Google is launching an iOS application to allow iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users to access their Google eBookstore content on their devices, although the application does not yet appear to have gone live in the App Store. With the company’s Web reader, users can access their content through computers running any Javascript-enabled browser.
Notably, Google is also partnering with third-party booksellers such as Powell’s and Alibris to allow customers of those business to purchase Google eBooks directly through those stores’ sites. Digital right management (DRM) technology on Google eBooks is driven by Adobe’s Content Server 4.
A quick glance at Google’s offerings for The New York Times Best Sellers shows pricing for most titles at $12.99, equivalent to pricing for those same titles in Apple’s iBookstore. A handful titles are, however, priced at $14.99 through Google while Apple offers them at $12.99.
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Amongst the emails that Steve Jobs has been responding to, he also responded to an inquiry by a MacRumors reader Siva about future of Blu-ray on the Mac. While Blu-ray has been a long requested feature for Macs, Apple has described Blu-ray licensing as bag of hurt and hasn’t made any moves to incorporate the drives into their desktop Macs.
That seems unlikely to change in the near future if Steve Jobs’ recent email replies are any guide. Siva emailed Jobs about being disappointed that the recently revised Mac mini didn’t include a Blu-ray drive. To this, Steve Jobs replied:
Bluray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD – like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats.
Siva responded that even though this may be true in the long run, he argued the medium term benefits were substantial, including high density backups and high quality video. He also argued that high-end video formats have had a much higher uptake and points out the lack of DRM was in part what made MP3 take off. Jobs’ final response, however, offered little hope:
No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off. And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue.
I think you may be wrong – we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over.