Is Google Getting Ready to Enter the eBook Market?
According to a report in the New York Times this morning, Google is getting ready to enter the eBook market by providing publishers with an infrastructure for direct-to-consumer sales. The Times reports that Google discussed this initiative with publishers at last weekend's BookExpo in New York. According to the times, Google is mostly interested in creating an architecture that would enable publishers to do direct-to-consumer sales (with the checkout handled by Google Checkout, we assume). But there is also no reason to believe that this initiative could not include some kind of electronic store, maybe on top of Google's controversial Google Books service.
Competition for Amazon
Publishers will probably be happy to see more competition for Amazon, which, at $9.99, is holding the price for eBooks artificially low by subsidizing the price. Amazon also uses the cheap price of books as a way to sell more of its Kindle eBook readers. With its Kindle, Amazon also makes the most popular dedicated hardware eBook reader, with Sony's eReader a distant second. According to the Times, Google would allow publishers to charge whatever price they prefer.
Can Google Offer a Compelling User Experience?
As long as Amazon charges less than the publishers, and as long as the company offers a superior end-to-end experience for users, even a company like Google will have a hard time breaking into this market. As more and more hardware eBook readers enter the market, it will be interesting to see if Amazon will be able to hold on to its position as a market leader, and if Google will be able to create a compelling user experience.
Judging from the report in the Times, users would use their browser to access and read books. Given Google's emphasis on producing compelling products using HTML5, this would make sense, but most users would probably prefer a dedicated reader over a cached version of a book in their browsers (Google already offers browser-based versions of Google Books for iPhone and Android users). It is also not clear if Google will support any open eBook standards like ePub, or if it will implement its own format.
Context: Google Books
Google's desire to enter this market has to be seen in the context of Google Books and the Google Books settlement. Depending on the company's arrangement with the publisher, Google can already display up to 20% of the content of an in-print book, but when a consumer actually goes ahead and buys the book after browsing it on Google, the company only gets a small referral free. If Google could sell eBooks directly, it would stand to make a far larger profit.
On the one hand, it would be good to see some stronger competition in the eBook market for Amazon, which already acquired Lexcycle, the #2 eBook player on the iPhone this April. On the other hand, it is also important to note that with Google Books, Google also holds its own kind of monopoly for books on the Internet. After all, Google Books already makes 1.5 million out-of-copyright books available for free.
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love Google books, let's see what they will do. (maybe they will grant support to Italy as well)
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A few things - $9.99 is not artificially low, it is simply lower than publishers would like. This is because many publishers believe that eBook sales cannibalize hardcover sales, however there is, to my knowledge, no evidence to support this belief.
Beyond that, this isn't competition for Amazon, it's competition for Scribd, as Google will be keeping books in the cloud. Google says, and there is no reason not to believe them, that users will be able to read books offline if they are cached, but how many people have their cache set to automatically empty? This leaves the books largely as an online-only event.
While more and more people do have a constant internet connection thanks to the proliferation of smart phones, the entire ordeal smacks of the last time Google tried to sell content. Google Video much?
Well its not easy to say but if google comes in ebook market then i must say google can beat anyone in this market. They all ready have billion of book and the last thing Google can do anything in this Web.
Google has been promising to do this for three or four years. Makes you wonder why they've waited so long? Now that the perception is that Amazon has the eBook market locked down with the Kindle, Google can compete, no holds barred.
I imagine Google drives quite a bit of traffic to Amazon for nonfiction sales. Now that they've let Amazon build up the market for e-books, I wonder if that search traffic is suddenly going to start going to the Google bookstore?
Interesting thought. But I don't think we can rule out Google coming out with it's own e-reader (or perhaps more likely, an e-reader app for the Android platform.)
Posted by: Brandon Mendelson
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June 1, 2009 2:07 PM
Good idea. Thank uncle google..
It's a lot silly to price ebooks at $9.99. It's been proven over the past nine years (at least) that customers (and that includes me) will pay for specific advice. And that they will pay larger sums of money, because they see the relevance of not having to wait for months for information.
So the first factor is one of quick, specific information that most people are willing to pay a premium for. You can argue all you want, but there's proof of e-books selling (and selling for well over 1000% over the $9.99 price).
Ok, so maybe they can't sell a book as a PDF for $200 if the bookstore sells it for $16.99. But why reduce the price? This is the stupidity factor at play. Just reduce prices because you are putting it on another medium. That's ridiculous. Books are underpriced anyway. It costs upwards of $5000 to produce a book in an e-format (design, proofing etc). So why give away the store?
Who wants to read Beta books.
All Google produces is "Beta".
Beta books?
So funny.:)
Google is powerful to build it's empery.
There are a lot of products still in beta version.