According to Japan Today, Google has apparently snagged over 25,000 authors and publishers in their upcoming endeavor. What makes it better, though, is that the report also says that Google has managed to wrangle all of them for the launch, and not just some kind of staggered release after the digital bookstore launches in just a few short months. So, here’s the result: over 4 million titles. That puts the total number of reported Google Edition titles well above those currently available for the eReader market.
Could Google Editions lead the market? 4 million titles?
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If it’s a cloud-only service, who cares? It makes our investments in e-readers useless. If Google Editions doesn’t give me something that I can use on my sony reader, why would I buy anything from it?
There’s no indication that Google Editions is going to be a cloud-only service. They’ve talked about delivering EPUB, as they currently are doing, from the first time that word leaked out. Originally it was going to be purely non-DRMed EPUB, but they had to cave in and are going to use Adobe DRM on EPUB.
The news reports have concentrated on the browser-readable feature because that’s something that no other major e-book store offers. But that’s not the only way you can read your e-books.
(All of this is subject to change. Google Editions has changed directions a number of times already. But I don’t see any reason they wouldn’t continue their plan of selling non-DRMed and Adobe DRMed EPUBs.)
Note that the Kindle cannot deal with Adobe EPUBs, and that Google will need to create an app for the iPad if they want their e-books readable on that platform.
@ Doug
I read on one of the well-known tech blogs something that made me think it would be a cloud-only service, but nothing was definite, of course. I’ll be ecstatic if google editions offers epub (drm free or adobe drm), especially if the ebooks they sell aren’t buggy pieces of crap.