Image via CrunchBaseGoogle Makes A Play For A Piece Of The E-Books Market : All Tech Considered : NPRThe market for electronic books just got a little more competitive. Google is rolling out an online retail store that will sell e-books from some 9,000 publishers, including all of the major houses.
Just before Monday morning's launch, I got a look at the new website. On the surface, it doesn't look much different from the Amazon or Apple e-book sites.
"We're really sticking with the classic reading platform," Scott Dougall, part of the team that developed Google's new service, told me.
Google's e-books are nothing fancy — no bells and whistles. They don't have 3-D pictures or social networking. You can't just put your finger on a word and get the dictionary definition like you can with the iPad. Dougall said Google doesn't want to interfere with the reading experience "because ultimately the book and the story are ... the most valuable property."
What sets Google's service apart from the other two retailers is that its e-books are stored online, so they can be read on almost any Internet-connected device — a desktop computer, a laptop, a smart phone. Once you buy a book, you just sign into your account and read.
Mike Shatzkin, a book industry consultant, says he thinks that will open up e-books to a lot more people. "What Google is doing is enabling anybody with a Web browser to have an e-book experience. That means probably that we're going to see far more titles than made sense in the previous e-book world."
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