After various announcements and delays, Google's bookstore is now open for business in the US. Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC technology correspondent, is impressed. Read his blog post on this here
Key comments:
- 'Booksellers and publishers are pretty desperate to see the arrival of a service which could provide real competition for the Kindle store, and prevent Amazon from building a virtual monopoly in the electronic bookselling market here.'
- 'You can read Google's books online, in the cloud, or you can download them to read across a number of devices - on a computer, on an Apple iPhone or iPad, on any number of phones or tablet computers running Google's Android operating system. One place you can't read them, of course, is a Kindle. '
- 'Publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have had plenty of run-ins with Amazon over pricing, so they are enthusiastic about another route to the electronic market.'
- Booksellers are enthusiastic because Google is offering independent booksellers a chance to sell e-books through its new service. Currently, if you're an independent bookseller, it's hard to compete with Waterstones or Amazon on e-books.
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