Google adds eBooks to Android Market

Important given advent of Honeycomb for new gen of Android tablets. Expert Reviews: "An extension of the Google eBooks store launched late last year in the US and formerly known as Google Editions, the Books portion of Android Market makes it possible to buy and download electronic books for reading on an Android 3.0 device."

Digital Book World: Google Says eBook Program Off to a Good Start

PW: "How’s Google eBooks doing so far? According to Google product manager Abraham Murray, speaking at Digital Book World yesterday, so far so good. In a talk entitled 10 Fun Facts about Google eBooks, Murray offered a few general observations about the first two months of the cloud-based program, although no solid numbers and no real surprises. ... "

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. ...

Indie Bookstores Participating with Google eBooks DON'T AS YET KNOW What Percentage of Sales $ They Will Get to Keep

So says Michael Tucker, president of the American Booksellers Association in Tarrytown, NY. CSMonitor: "About 220 ABA member stores are already selling Google eBooks through the ABA’s IndieCommerce website, and many more are expected to join, says Tucker. A list of participating ABA member stores that have opted in to sell Google eBooks online can be found here. It’s not yet clear how Google will share eBook revenues with independent sellers. Most book sales involve a 70-30 split, with publishers getting 70 percent of revenues and sellers 30 percent. Google will take a percentage of that 30 percent share, says Tucker, though it’s not yet known how much. 'It will be very reasonable,' he says."

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.