ReadWriteWeb

Google is getting ready to launch its own e-book store and challenge Apple and Amazon. According to The Wall Street Journal, Chris Palma, Google's manager for strategic partner development, announced the timetable for the launch of the company's e-book store during an event at Random House's Manhattan offices earlier today. Google Editions, as the new store will be called, will launch in late June or July.

Google just announced that all the content from Google Books is now searchable from the Search Options panel the company introduced earlier this year. Until today, users could only use the Search Options panel to restrict searches to videos, forums, and reviews. This move should give Google Books a boost in visibility. It will also make it easier for users to search for books and magazines right from Google's default search page. There have been some rumors that Google plans to sell eBooks on Google Books by the end of this. Maybe this is a step in that direction.

In part 1 of this series, we looked at the three big waves crashing down on the traditional book publishing business: Google Search, the Kindle and e-books, and print on demand. In this second part, we'll try to wipe the muck from our crystal ball and see how this could play out in the future, specifically for the major players of book publishing: readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors.

"Bits of destruction" is a phrase Fred Wilson uses to describe the destructive part of "creative destruction" brought on by digitization. We hear a lot about the destruction wrought on the newspaper business. A more interesting and nuanced wave is now hitting the book publishing business. Actually, it is three waves: the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand. However this plays out, a lot of people will be affected, but the way in which it will play out is not at all obvious. This is too big a subject for one post, so read this as an introduction to a multi-post investigation.

If you spend time on the mobile web, you know there's certainly no shortage of content already available on our phones. What if you're on the run and get a hankering for some classic literature though? Enter the just released Google Book Search Mobile at books.google.com/m.

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.

Google today announced that it is adding magazines to its lineup for Google Book Search. These magazines include publications like Popular Science and New York Magazine, but also more obscure publications like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In the long run, Google expects to add search results from these magazines to its main Google.com search results.

It is not clear if Google struck a deal with specific publishers to allow for this, but the selection of included magazines still feels a bit uneven and leaves out quite a few well known publications like Time, Newsweek, and Wired.