Google Acquires End-to-End EBook Technology Startup

WSJ:

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Google Inc. (GOOG) has acquired eBook Technologies Inc. in a move the Internet search giant said was aimed at delivering richer reading experiences on tablets, electronic readers and other portable devices.

It was not immediately clear how Google intends to use eBook's technologies, which include an end-to-end electronic book platform offering a full range of ebook products and services. ...

The deal comes just over one month after Google launched Google eBooks, its long-anticipated digital bookselling enterprise. Google eBooks will enable the Web giant to challenge two of its powerful rivals, Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), in the digital books business, which is valued at close to $1 billion and is expected to grow in the coming years.

Google eBooks: Is That All There Is?

Jon Evans, Techcrunch: "Two weeks ago the Google eBookstore finally launched, and the world was briefly amazed. Google Editions, as it was known until launch, was the book world’s Duke Nukem Forever vaporware for seven years, depending on how you count. Its actual emergence was like the birth of a unicorn. A mewling, misshapen, half-baked unicorn. ... A ridiculous amount of ado has been made about the eBookstore’s one innovative feature: they’re allowing independent bookstores to sell Google eBooks through their own web sites. I don’t know what it is about indie bookstores that makes otherwise hard-headed analysts go all misty-eyed and misty-minded, but anyone who thinks this is a game-changer is on crack. 'A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil,' quoth William Gibson, and love ‘em or hate ‘em, bookstores are to ebooks what travel agents are to online travel; unnecessary and irrelevant. Leaving that distraction aside, when you compare Amazon’s ebook ecosystem to Google’s, the latter finds itself in the unfamiliar position of inferior copycat. ... "

Big Surprise: Google Undercuts Its Indie "Partners" on Price

eBookNewser gives an example: "... for the popular title The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, prices vary a lot among different Google eBook vendors. Google sells the eBook for $9.99, down from the list price of $26.00. Bay area independent bookstore Alibris has the eBook listed at $16.90. And Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore based in Washington DC, is selling the eBook for $18.20. The eBook is $9.99 in the Kindle store. If Google is going to match Amazon for extremely low pricing, then indie booksellers are going to have a tough time competing."

Joe Wikert: Underwhelmed by Google's eBookstore

Publishing 2020 Blog: "For the past 18 months or so, like many of you, I've been anxiously awaiting Google's ebookstore launch. Originally referred to as Google Editions, the service finally arrived this week with the name Google eBookstore. Now that I've had some time to tour the store and download some sample content, I have one question: Why did it take this long to launch a service that offers nothing new? Seriously, I was figuring there would be some groundbreaking functionality but this is basically the Kindle's bookstore with fewer bells and whistles."

Google eBooks Has Its Own Fail Whale

Gearlog: "As far as whales go, the Twitter Fail Whale is pretty well known. Now even Google wants some of the whale action of its own. The new Google eBooks' error page takes a literary spin on the Fail Whale with its 'Whale Fail,' featuring the classic Captain Ahab and infamous Moby Dick. Poor Ahab can relate to the frustration and anger you feel when a error page pops-up, which you can clearly see from his disappointed, down-turned head and frustrated shoulders. With this little error page graphic, Google was clearly trying to appeal to both techies and bookworms." Of course, the last time I checked, old Moby was white. He seems to have gone through some changes. - EJR

Don't Believe the Rhetoric Behind Google's New "Open" eBook Store

Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine: "Google's e-books are 'open' in the same way that politicians are 'bipartisan' and oil companies are 'green'—the claim makes for good marketing, even if it lacks substance. Buying from Google rather than Amazon will give you no greater control over your books. You're not likely to get any practical benefit from going with Google, either. In fact, Amazon's 'closed' books will soon work on more devices than Google's 'open' books."

Amazon Debuts Kindle for Web, While Google Brings Knife to a Gunfight

VentureBeat:

Signaling renewed competition in the e-reading space, Amazon today debuted a web-based extension to their existing Kindle platform with a new product called Kindle for the Web, which is nearly identical to a product Google announced yesterday dubbed Google eBooks, which is also a cloud-based ebookstore and reading webapp that lives within the browser.

Unlike Google’s dearth of reading devices, Amazon’s new service snaps into the same “buy once, read everywhere” experience that the existing line-up has successfully offered: last-page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights synced and automatically archived across all Kindle hardware and applications for third-party platforms such as iOS, Android, Blackberry and the like.

Kindle for the Web affords a few extra features too: since whole books can now be read in an embeddable reader applet, independent third-party publishers and authors can now preview and sell content directly on their own sites, earning them referral fees through Amazon’s Associates Program.

These fees are in fact the only thing that really separate Kindle for the Web from Google eBooks, which has not yet developed a third-party seller model in their product.

It’s actually hard to see why Google would enter the e-reading market without disruptive new distribution and revenue models, facing up against entrenched competition from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, which can clearly afford to experiment. ...

Big Hiccups in Google eBooks

The Washington Post notes numerous problems:

Google's Web-based reader application will be able to show a book's original fonts and graphics, but it won't support offline reading at the start.

Other promised features didn't make the cut for the launch. The company held up support for copy-and-paste and printing, for example, after too many publishers balked. Highlighting and annotation features won't happen until later. The same goes for text-to-speech capabilities that would allow Google's reader programs to read a book aloud. ...

It's important to remember that although this is the seemingly unstoppable Google we're talking about, the Mountain View, Calif., company doesn't have that much experience selling directly to consumers. One of its few earlier ventures in that category - an online video store it launched in 2006 - lasted about a year and a half before Google shuttered it.

After trying out Google eBooks in two Web browsers, three mobile devices (an iPad 3G, an iPhone 4 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab) and one e-book reader (Barnes & Noble's NookColor), I can only think this store could use another run through the typewriter.

Browsing and searching through Google's e-book store is no problem, and it seems to stock the same new titles at the same prices as elsewhere. But its pricing and selection didn't beat the Kindle store's in a search for three older, Washington-related books.

Christopher Buckley's "Thank You for Smoking" costs $9.99 from Google but $8.69 on Amazon. My friend Robert Schlesinger's "White House Ghosts" goes for $13.99, the same as Amazon's Kindle price - and $1.30 more than what Amazon charges for a hardcover copy. Zachary Schrag's excellent history of the Washington Metro, "The Great Society Subway," is overpriced for the Kindle at $16.50, but Google asks $17.60 for a version, optimistically labeled "Better for larger screens," that offers only scanned-in images of pages.

When I switched to Google's iOS and Android apps, I was puzzled to see that the former offer more features. The Android program offered fewer font choices (four, compared with seven) than the iPad and iPhone apps and - of all the things for Google to leave out - lacked the iOS release's search function.

Finally, I downloaded PDF and ePub-format copies of "Alice in Wonderland," one of the three public-domain titles that every Google Books buyer gets for free, to inspect on a Barnes & Noble NookColor. The PDF was unreadable - I couldn't even flip from page to page, and its illustrations were replaced by empty red squares - but the ePub looked fine, aside from too-large images.

Had I bought a title off Google to move to the B&N device, I would have been subjected to a fussy file-transfer procedure, required by Google's Adobe-supplied DRM, that involves installing a copy of Adobe Digital Editions, opening the book in that free program, then employing that program to sideload the book on the Nook.

No, thanks. If I wanted to be reminded about why users justifiably resent DRM, I'd rather read a book about the record labels' failed adoption of it. And, given the issues I see in Google eBooks, I might be happier getting that book at a library.

Adobe's eBook DRM Adopted By Google

RTTnews: "Adobe Systems Inc. (ADBE: News ), Monday said Google (GOOG: News ) would use Adobe's Content Server 4 software Google eBooks' content protection, joining over 200 other publishers and distributors who use the Adobe's Digital Rights Management, or DRM, solution."

Alibris and Google Set Up eBook Deal

San Francisco Business Times: "Book search site Alibris made a deal with giant Google Inc. to sell electronic books. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has been scanning and digitizing books for years, and offers many for free and for sale on its site. Now users at Alibris, an Emeryville business that started as a rare and out-of-print book search engine, will be able to peruse and purchase ebooks from the Google system."

The Google eBookstore is Not a Serious Threat to Kindle (and Why I’m Not Shopping There) - Nate the Great

As usual, the Digital Reader gets it right: "I decided to get a head start on all the pundits that tomorrow are going to post stories with titles like “GE will Kill the Kindle”. I’m not going to discuss the obvious format issue (I don’t think it’s that important). But I did find a problem. I’ve been looking over GE since it launched this morning, and I think it’s missing a critical component. Customer service. ... "

Google Finally Opens Its E-Bookstore

NYTimes: "The Google eBookstore could be a significant benefit to independent bookstores like Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., that have signed on to sell Google e-books on their Web sites through Google — the first significant entry for independents into the e-book business." Could be? No. Won't be. Mark my words.

DRM ala Google

The Guardian: "A greater concern may be over how the content is protected: publishers are fearful that widespread adoption of ebooks could lead to spiraling piracy mirroring that seen in the music business. But Google says in the page about security for Editions that 'once a Google Edition is purchased and is added to a consumer's bookshelf, it can only be accessed when the consumer logs into his or her Google account. When Google Editions are purchased on our site, a Google account is needed to access the content, reducing the likelihood that consumers will share their login information with others'. It adds: 'Each consumer's Google Edition has a unique coding that caches the book when it is accessed through a browser (as opposed to a digital download) ... This means that the Google Edition is broken down into fragments and temporarily stored in – and accessed through – the browser window. The Google Editions web experience, therefore, is not that of a file download – it is an experience that is optimized for reading in the browser. This allows Google to detect and protect against abuse of each Google Edition.'"

Google Set to Launch E-Book Venture

Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal:

Google Inc. is in the final stages of launching its long-awaited e-book retailing venture, Google Editions, a move that could shake up the way digital books are sold.

The long-delayed venture—Google executives had said they hoped to launch this summer—recently has cleared several technical and legal hurdles, people close to the company say. It is set to debut in the U.S. by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year, said Scott Dougall, a Google product management director.

In recent weeks, independent booksellers, which are expected to play a big role in Google Editions, began receiving contracts from their trade group. Several publishers said they were exchanging files with Google—a sign that it is close to launch, publishers say. "Because of the complexity of this project, we didn't want to come out with something that wasn't thorough," Mr. Dougall said.

Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

... Key details of Google's e-book project remain unanswered. Foremost is what percentage of revenue Google will share with independent bookstores and other retailers. It also isn't clear how many bookselling partners it has lined up and who they are. More than 200 independent booksellers in the U.S. could sign up, according to the American Booksellers Association. ...

London: Free Word Centre Debate on (drum-roll) ... THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK

Books | guardian.co.uk: "People often talk about the future of the book; strangely, no one in the UK has recently thought to examine the prospects for the book industry in public. So the Free Word Centre's debate on the future of publishing was a first, and very interesting it was, too. As it turned out, the headline news from this event, which I chaired with a panel of two influential contemporary publishers (Faber's Stephen Page and Canongate's Dan Franklin), a self-styled techno-geek from the BBC (Bill Thompson), and a very senior Google person (Santiago de la Mora) was all about Google. ..."

Desperation Row: Skeptical Indie Booksellers (Hens) Get Google Editions Details from the Fox's Mouth

The headline here isn't that Google seems poised to screw their erstwhile indie bookseller partners. No, the headline is that ABA COO Len Vlahos believes e-book sales will eventually "level out" to represent just "20% or 25%" of the total book market. Who agrees? May I have a show of hands? PW:

When Google Editions goes live, which still could be six months from now, the Web sites of booksellers who participate in ABA’s IndieCommerce will go live with it. But independents won’t be Google’s only partners, ABA could be selling e-books alongside Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble. Those were among the revelations at the New England Independent Bookseller Association fall conference held last week in Providence, R.I., in a session about how the partnership between ABA and Google Editions will work.

Former Harvard University Press sales director turned Google strategic partner development manager Chris Palma discussed what a Google Editions enabled IndieCommerce site will look like. ...

With Google Editions, said Palma, “the role of publishers and booksellers as gatekeepers is going to become stronger. People are going to realize that free is not best.” He described Google’s role as a wholesaler like Ingram or Baker & Taylor. Under the agency model, Google will act as an agent on behalf of the publisher and prices will be fixed across the board. Still, the fact that Google will also be selling direct on its site gave some booksellers pause. As one commented, “it’s kind of like the fox watching the henhouse.” Palma praised booksellers for being able to curate, adding that what Google excels at is selling ads, $26 billion worth; it has not needed to sell e-books. Kenny Brechner, owner of Devaney Doak and Garrett Booksellers in Farmington, Maine, was not convinced: “You’re not good at bookselling yet. Over time you’ll be creating a curatorial model."

 ABA COO Len Vlahos, who attended the meeting with CEO Oren Teicher, acknowledged that the partnership with Google has some drawbacks. “ABA would be foolish, if we didn’t come into this with skepticism, too,” he said. “But Google’s DNA is wired to help people search. We don’t know who the other partners are. They could be Barnes & Noble or Wal-Mart. The alternative is we won’t be in the conversation. Truthfully these people came to us. We feel it’s absolutely imperative that we be there.”

In that spirit, ABA is talking to Baker & Taylor about Blio; the Sony negotiations are over. Vlahos’s believes that e-books will not be 100% of the book market. But even if they level out at 20% or 25%, it’s important for ABA to ensure that independent booksellers get their 10% share. “We ought to be focused on market share,” he said. “Our hope is you will be competitive.” Most booksellers agree and outside of the meeting expressed concerns about the possibility of missing Christmas. ...

Perhaps Japan Will See Google Editions Before the U.S. Does

Yahoo! News: "TOKYO (AFP) – US Internet giant Google said Monday it would launch an electronic books service in Japan next year despite a chilly reception from major Japanese publishers. The Japanese version of Google Editions may have to start with a limited number of titles, said Yoichi Sato, a strategic partner development manager at Google Japan. Major Japanese publishers are still uneasy about handing over book data, especially of in-copyright titles, to the foreign IT giant, fearing that the content may be used for unintended purposes, Sato told a media briefing. Japanese copyright laws also require strict and complicated permission processes involving authors and publishers, before Google can use book contents for online searches and sales, he said. ..."

Clash of eBook Titans Collateral Damage on Google Editions, Sony, Others

 Here are two particularly salient observations from Nicholas Kolakowski's current piece in eWeek:

... the longer Google waits to roll out Google Editions (and the longer it neglects to provide details about how the service will work, in order to build the all-important buzz) the harder its eventual battle against Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple, all of which have been moving aggressively to draw readers to their respective platforms. In that context, Google’s chances of breaking off a substantial portion of the e-book market seem dimmer and dimmer by the week

And this:

... if Sony plans on using Android as the operating system for its future e-readers, it could be tacit acknowledgment that none of its previous steps have been enough; through Android, Sony could conceivably add software features equivalent to those of the ever-more-advanced Kindle and Nook

That would place Sony smack-dab in the middle of what’s become an extraordinarily competitive space, locking jaws with not only Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the Apple iPad, but also the upcoming Android-based tablet PCs. If Sony were willing to spend millions of dollars to aggressively assert itself in that position, it could translate into a market-share advantage—but Sony seems reluctant to grow fangs in that regard, with anemic e-reader marketing and a follower’s mentality when it comes to pricing and features.

Worthwhile Meditation from Mike Shatzkin on Strengths and Weaknesses of Upcoming eBook Platform Alternatives

Three new ebook platforms nearing their debut – The Shatzkin Files:

... Three entirely new ebook platforms are now poised to make their debut. Each of them has an angle, or a USP, that the others don’t and that the vendors, devices, and platforms that preceded them — notably Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, and Sony — don’t. The three new platforms are Google Editions, Blio, and Copia.

Google’s special proposition is ubiquity; Blio’s special proposition is enhanced feature sets; and Copia’s special proposition is building social networking right into the content consumption platform. ...

eWeek's Google Watch: Google Editions Doesn't Stand a Chance vs. Amazon Kindle

Clint Boulton: "Google: Apple owns music, Amazon owns books. Don't embarrass yourself. Google Book Search is a different animal because it aims to make orphan works the other book providers aren't trucking in available online for purchase. This could catch on big in university libraries. But Editions is just another mini-mart for books. The open device and platform approach is a nice gesture, but it's not enough. Amazon Kindle is rolling."