Kindle Version 2.5 will provide pan and zoom for PDFs, allow you to assemble your books into collections and to use larger, sharper fonts. Interestingly, you will be able to post selections from your reading to Facebook and to Twitter directly from your Kindle.

Given that Amazon sells six Kindle books for every 10 paper books, an innovation in the most popular e-reader effects an increasingly-significant number of books and readers. Physical books rarely change all at once as an e-reader does. Interesting to see how development changes in ever-changing hardware change the reading experience, if they do.

Read more on the Kindle at ReadWriteWeb.

Photo by Austin Evan

For now, this new feature is only available in the United States, though according to a blog post on the Google Book Search blog, the company plans to make this feature "available elsewhere in the future."

Google's e-book format is widely compatible, available on Android and Apple devices, Sony, Kobo and Elonex e-readers, as well as through the Web. They're stored in the cloud, so you can pick up where you left off on any device. You won't find native support for your Kindle or your Nook, though.

Google has its work cut out for it in e-books. After last week's high-profile launch of the Kindle Fire tablet and new e-ink Kindles, all of which are aggressively priced, Amazon is trying to get its e-readers into as many hands as possible. Barnes & Noble is also expected to update its Nook Color soon. These two leading e-book sellers want to dominate the marketplace by making their reading devices ubiquitous.

To stay in the game, Google is going the other way. Google Books are available in EPUB format, which is is the most open and compatible standard. The Google Books reader is available as a native app for Android and iOS. Google books can also be downloaded as PDF, which can then be moved to a Kindle, but with less control over the content.

Read more about today's U.K. launch on the Inside Google Books blog.

Where do you buy your e-books, and what devices do you read on?

Maybe the two most noticeable new features are the improved search within books and the new way to turn pages. Before, searching within a book was already one of the most useful features of Google Books, but search results were only displayed in a small sidebar. Now, after this update, search results appear in their context in a list of short snippets from the text. In addition, instead of just seeing results sorted by page number, Google Books can now also sort results by relevance.

Page Turners

As for scrolling through books, a transparent bar at the bottom of the page now allows you to turn pages by just clicking the page turn button. We are not quite sure how useful this is going to be for users on a desktop machine, but this might turn out to be quite a boon for users on laptops and netbooks who don't use an external mouse with a scroll wheel.

Embedding, Table of Contents, Nicer Book Overview Page

Embedding books is also a nice new feature (developers were able to do this with the help of Google's APIs already), as well as the ability to access a drop-down menu with a book's table of contents. For out-of-copyright books, the Google Books team also made the plain text mode easier to find and read.

The new layout for the Book Overview page is also quite nice. In addition to all of this, Google has now moved the sidebar with additional information about a book to the left of the page (it used to be on the right), probably in order to bring the Google Books design in line with the rest of Google's search products.

Overall, this is a nice update for Google Books. There are no spectacular new features here, but better search within books is going to make a big difference for Google Books' usability, and the rest of the new features are good, evolutionary updates of Google Books.

It's a very handy new version of the site that lets you search through and read in full, 1.5 million books on your phone's browser. Regular Google Book Search users know that these books are all scanned in as images, but for the new mobile version Google has used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to grab the text on the pages. The whole system works quite well.

After spending a few minutes perusing the political science section I found a number of interesting titles that I've bookmarked. The business and economics section is a charming selection of very old books. You have to remember that only works old enough to be in the public domain can be viewed in full for free, but if you can accept that then there's lots of fun to be had. You can also read very old magazines. On your phone!

Check out the Google Book Search blog for more details.

Now, Google has begun that process, allowing readers to see the books as originally printed instead of rendered onto an artificially-generated white background.

"First, these books are interesting artifacts. They have changed their appearance over the centuries, and there is a cultural value in viewing them. Second, because of aging and bleed-through, it can be very difficult to display the images as clean text over a white background; in many cases it's actually easier to read the text from the original (what we call "full-color") images."

So get your Galileo Galilei on. Or maybe Nostradamus is more your speed?

Now, this era is not that of the great illuminated manuscripts and folios of the Medieval world. There are illustrations, if not many illustrated capitals. But more to the point, such electronic facsimile can provide the modern reader a sense of nearness to the circumstances of the book's creation and therefore to the mentality of both the writer and the readers.

Google Books and similar tools are always a trade-off. Anyone who has ever looked at a Velasquez in a book or online then seen it in person at the Prado knows it's never the same. But these sorts of tools provide access both at a distance and to many more people that would otherwise see them in person.

Back on April Fool's Day, 3D viewing was accessed from a button within the Google Books app, and now the feature has returned as a URL hack Easter egg. It's pretty clear Google doesn't really expect people to read text in 3D - reading is tough enough on the eyes already - but they obviously think it's fun to leave it in. When viewing in 3D, the text becomes an anaglyphic image and is bent to give the appearance of a rounded book page. Any pair of red-cyan 3D glasses should work, Google says.

While Google is clearly having some fun here, does this bring up a larger question about 3D? Are books a viable market for 3D technology? This writer respectfully disagrees with anyone that says they are, at least until 3D technology improves. Then again, I'm more inclined to listen to an audiobook these days than read a physical book, so perhaps a little glitz and sparkle is what the printed (or digital) page needs.

Follow this link to see an example of 3D viewing in Google Books, and leave us your thoughts on 3D reading in the comments. And if someone has 3D glasses on them, let us know what you think of the Google Books 3D experience.

For now, these printers are only available in a about a dozen locations, including the University of Michigan Shapiro Library in Ann Arbor, MI, and the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt. The Harvard Book Store will also soon get one of these machines as well. By early 2010, On Demand Books hopes to have sold about 35 to 40 machines and this new deal with Google will surely help the company to reach this goal.

It's good to see that Google acknowledges that not everybody wants to read everything on a screen. While you could always just print out the PDF versions of the public domain books on your own printer, the Espresso machine can quickly print library-quality books in minutes - a service that might just be worth a few dollars.

With the Kindle, Amazon has created the current de facto standard for hardware eReaders, but the market is still young enough for others to be able to regain the lead again. The fact that Sony bothered to send out press releases about the fact that it now offers 1 million free books clearly shows that the competition in the eBook market is heating up.

Sadly, most eReaders are locked down with digital rights management software, so that users can't just transfer books from one device to another. Because of this, users are locked into one store once they buy an eReader, and the availability of books in the eReader's eBook store could easily sway customers in one direction or another. While Sony offers more free books than other companies, the average price in the Sony eBook store is generally higher than the standard $9.99 that Barnes & Noble and Amazon are charging.

It is worth noting that Google only scans these free books and doesn't edit them in any form, so that they often contain spelling errors.

If you own a Sony Reader and want to access these free eBooks, you can download the necessary software here. The PRS-500, one of Sony's first eReaders, however, is not compatible with the Google Books software.

When we first heard about Google Editions last year, Google's plan was to offer around half a million books at launch. At the time, Google also noted that it wanted its books to be compatible with any device, whether that's a laptop, phone or dedicated e-reader. Apple's tablet wasn't on the horizon back then, but chances are that Google will also want its books to be compatible with this new platform. Given that Google is already using the ePub standard, we can only hope that Google's plan is to sell DRM-free ePub books.

"Google eBooks stores your library in the digital cloud," writes the company, "so you can read all of your favorite books using just about any device with an Internet connection."

For those of you worried about reading your books on the go or up in the air, where there might be no Internet connection, Google says that "once you open your book using our mobile reader apps, your book will sync to your device and you can continue reading it online or offline."

As for accessing these books, Google supports a number of devices, from Android and iOS smartphones to any e-book reader that supports the Adobe e-book platform to any device with a Javascript-enabled browser. Along with reading e-books, there is a Google Books app for both Android and iOS devices, which not only let you read the books, but make e-book purchases on the go.

Google's e-book initiative was first expected to launch last summer, but it has been held up by several legal and technical hurdles. Now, it looks like it got here just in time for the holidays, although there is no readily apparent way to buy a Google e-book as a gift. This is a feature that just came to Amazon's Kindle, after all, so it might not be available at launch. For now, Google's e-books will be available through its online store, mobile apps, and through Powell's Books, Albiris and participating members of the American Booksellers Association.

A common speculation is that Google's device-agnostic entry into the e-book market is going to be disruptive and take a chunk of users and revenue from Amazon. What do you think? Will features like e-ink be enough to stave off the Big G or is a cloud-based, device-agnostic offering going to change e-books forever?

We are not going to sit here and say anything foolish like "the paper book is dead." It most certainly is not. Since April 1, 2011, for every 100 paper books that have been sold on Amazon.com, there have been 105 Kindle books sold, Amazon says. It is not like the e-book has killed the paper book and it probably never will. But, e-books are growing and Amazon's simple formula is driving the pace. Device ubiquity plus low prices and popular content equals: one killer platform steamrolling the competition.

If this announcement seems familiar, it kind of is. Amazon always announces how well Kindle books are doing compared to physical books. In January 2010, the Kindle-to-paper book ratio was six e-books for every 10 physical books. In July 2010, Kindle books outpaced hardcover books. In October, Kindle bestsellers outsold print bestsellers two to one. Now, for the first time, all combined Kindle sales are better than print. What else is left to announce?

Well, there is also this: Amazon's newest offer in the Kindle family, the ad-support "Kindle with Special Offers" is already the best selling version of the e-reader, according to company. At $114, it is hard to beat.

Imagine Amazon taking its pricing and product formula into higher end devices. Amazon Android tablets are coming this year, there is little doubt about that anymore. It is a tricky landscape to enter. Amazon needs to make the user experience work on Android tablets in ways that the early entrants in the Honeycomb wars have not and sell it at a price point attractive to consumers.

Yet with Kindle books doing as well as they are, it is imaginable that Amazon can subsidize the margins on the hardware with book sales and perhaps even an ad-supported tablet like the new Kindle. It is interesting to watch the development and Amazon has done well for itself. It was one of the original huge Internet companies and it continues to dominate because it invests heavily in innovation and product strategy. Kindle and e-books are but a piece of a puzzle.

Yes, if your library uses Adobe Digital Editions for its e-books and if you have the Bluefire Reader app. The app, available for free for iPhone and iPad, allows you to access the digital version of the books you check out from your (participating) local library.

As we've noted before, the DRM restrictions on e-books can complicate the ability for libraries to make them accessible to patrons. But the Adobe Digital Editions and the Bluefire Reader app address this issue.

By using the Adobe Digital Edition, the Bluefire Reader app will also allow you to transfer books that you've purchased from many different booksellers between your various reading devices and personal computers.

The new feature will allow users to preview the first chapter of any Kindle book for free directly on the Web, just as iTunes users can sample songs before buying them.

Kindle for the Web seems like a natural progression for Kindle and we can only wonder how long it will be before the tool transitions from merely offering previews to full texts. While much of the appeal to the Kindle is its portability and its "electronic ink" screen, compatibility with more devices would only enhance the product. Already, Kindle books are available not only on the Kindle itself, but also the iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry and Android-based devices.

Providing a download- and install-free application for the Web could allow Amazon to sell frictionless single servings of e-books and bring the service into competition with sites like Google Books and Scribd.

EPUB: The One eBook Standard to Rule them All

EPUB is a free, standardized format that almost every hardware eReader or desktop software understands. Amazon's Kindle, however, cannot read EPUB texts without using some intermediary software that converts these books into a format the Kindle can understand. While there are a few competing formats, EPUB has turned into the de facto standard for eBooks. Some vendors, like Sony, wrap a digital rights management (DRM) solution around these books, but others just publish completely open, non-DRMed versions of their books. The EPUB files from Google Books will not be locked down by a DRM solution.

It is important to note, however, that these EPUB files were run through an optical character recognition (OCR) system and weren't edited afterwards. While this software has greatly improved over the last few years, there are still quite a few mistakes in most books. This post on the Google Books blog explains the conversion process in more detail. The PDF versions of these books don't suffer from this problem, as they are just copies of the actual pages. This also means, however, that these PDF files are far larger and that users can't, for example, adjust the size of the books' fonts according to the size of their screens.