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By David Rothman

image So much for e-books in the “clouds.” It’ll still happen at Google. But a new service called Google Editions will do an Amazon.com, sort of—and sell e-book files rather than just let you read public domain books or preview commercial ones online.

The link contains info for authors and publishers interested in offering their books this service within Google Book Search. News about Google Editions has already made the press, but it’s good to see Editions cranking up to balance out Amazon.com’s Kindle-based dominance of the e-book retail scene.

Google Editions very possibly will use the ePub format, already offered by Google Book Search, and it appears that it will rely on Adobe DRM for publishers wanting “protection.” A victory for the Sony Reader faction? Of course, if Google can either offer a Kindle-friendly format directly or provide for easy conversions, like Fictionwise, then so much the better. Yes, it appears that Google favors a multiformat philosophy.

Who knows where this will end up? Hard to say. Even now, readers can comment on titles listed in Google Book Search, but compared to Amazon’s comment-rich store, the pickings are pretty pathetic.

Perhaps Google will buy or partner up with a comment-oriented service such as Goodreads or LibraryThing. Whoops. Amazon already owns a minority share of the latter. But I wonder if it would be possible for Tim Spaulding, LibraryThing’s owner, to sell his majority holdings to Google, a nice way to slow down the Amazon juggernaut.

One cool aspect of the new Google service is that it won’t inflict DRM on the publishers that don’t want it. From Google:

“Here you can specify how consumers may interact with the Google Editions of the books they have purchased from you. You can choose not to apply Digital Rights Management (DRM) software to the digital file download of your books. DRM is intended to make it more difficult for consumers to use purchased content in ways not authorized by its owner. If you choose to make your Google Editions available without DRM, consumers will have more flexibility in using the content file. For further information on the Adobe ACS4 DRM option we plan to support, please see this page.”

More info: “You can also choose to allow buyers to copy, paste and print your Google Editions without restriction. By default, consumers will only be able to copy and paste up to 20% of a book’s content over a sixty day period. Additionally, consumers by default can print 100% of their purchased Google Editions but are limited to printing 20 pages per single print command.”

Another interesting questions is when—almost surely that’s the question, not “whether”—the service will go international. From the start? And just when in 2010 will the service start up, period?

Reminder/disclosure: I own a tiny speck of Google stock for retirement investment purposes, though you’d never now it from some of the posts I’ve written against the proposed Google Books Settlement.

Related: Google news roundup, Ebuon Academic Publishers, AppScout,  Reuters, the Register and MobileRead (thanks to Wiebe de Jager).

 
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