ReadWriteWeb

Google Books has had trouble on the content side. Google's approach has been too gung-ho, trying to "digitize the world's books" before publishers were ready for it. It also doesn't have the hardware reach that Amazon and Apple have. The only Android tablets taking off are the ones custom-built by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, who obviously prefer their own book businesses.

But Google's game is information. That's how Google Books is positioned - not as a content business or a hardware business, but as an information business. Google wants knowledge to be accessible. The Kindle service might be the best integrated with devices, and iBooks might look great on the demo floor of an Apple Store. But as a set of features for an e-book service, I'm rooting for Google Books.

Google's e-bookstore is now available in the United Kingdom. In addition to its primary offerings, Google has partnered with independent booksellers like Gardners' Hive and Blackwell's, so U.K customers can buy books through those stores.

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.

Just in the nick of time, the Google Books Ngram Viewer has graduated from Google Labs to become a full-fledged part of Google Books. The Ngram Viewer allows users to see how often a word or phrase has been used in books across history. Google Books contains millions of books dating back to the year 1400; "over 10% of all books ever published," according to the Ngram Viewer announcement.

Last month, Google announced that Google Labs, which allowed Google developers and users to "field test" experimental Web projects, will be phased out. Many Labs experiments will be sidelined, but the Ngram Viewer made it.

New rules governing how iOS apps handle in-app purchases went into effect on June 30, and the date passed without much fanfare and seemingly without much compliance from many apps that continued to offer content for sale. These apps included e-reader apps with links to their associated online bookstores, as well as a variety of others that offered users the ability to subscribe or make purchases.

But over the weekend, updates were issued for many e-reader apps, removing links to their bookstores in order to comply with Apple's new rules. These stipulate that Apple receive a 30% cut from in-app purchases and subscriptions, something that many publishers balked at, contending that that cut was too high.

When U.S. District Judge Denny Chin threw out the proposed Google Books Settlement earlier this year, he sent authors, publishers and Google back to the negotiating table in order to hammer out an agreement that would allow Google's digitization efforts to move forward.

But it seems those negotiations are taking too long, and at a conference between the groups today, Judge Chin put pressure on those involved to finalize things, threatening to set a "tight discovery schedule" if things aren't resolved when the group comes before him next on September 15.

There are some conflicting stories coming out the BookExpo America today about Google's plans for Google Books: one story speculating that Google may be planning an e-book rental service and another speculating that Google may be closing its e-bookstore.

The shuttering of the e-bookstore was something that Melville House Publishing wrote about today, contending that publishers are finding it difficult to get started in the bookstore and that Google has pulled its developers from the project. When ReadWriteWeb asked Google to comment, the company responded, "We refuse to comment on rumor and speculation," pointing to a blog post from Monday touting some of the successes from the first 6 months of the Google Books program: three million free Google eBooks and 250 independent booksellers selling them, for example.

But more interesting - although difficult to say if more plausible - is the possibility of an e-book rental service.

Google Labs launched a great new tool yesterday that graphs the frequency of occurrence of any search terms from across 500 billion words from 5.2 million books, over the last 200 years, in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish.

Called the Books Ngram Viewer, the tool offers a fascinating look at the way that language, literature and culture have changed throughout recent history. I've been typing in all kinds of fun searches and have included screenshots of 10 of my favorites below. What do all these changes mean? It's probably fodder for endless after dinner conversation and drinking games. Some of them are surprising and some are not at all. We would love it if you would share your thoughts and links to your favorite Ngram search results with other ReadWriteWeb readers in comments below. Thanks, Google, for providing this great example of the beauty made possible through indexing large sets of data.

I'd like to take a moment out of your regularly scheduled tech news reading to point out something that just made my day: Google Books has a great "page not found page." It's a "Whale Fail," not a "Fail Whale."

The page is a play on words referring to Twitter's "Fail Whale," the well-known "Twitter down" page that became famous - or rather, infamous - during Twitter's heavy growth period back in 2008.

It won't be long before we start seeing ads in e-books, a business professor and a former book editor wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial today.

Growing e-book sales and the opportunity for targeted advertising mean space in e-books is ripe for corporate messages. Add rapidly falling e-reader prices and the planned Google e-book store and the pressure is on for publishers and retailers to increase revenue from digital books.

Back on April 1, Google introduced 3D viewing to its online book reader, Google Books, but the feature was short-lived. In fact, it was down the next day. As was obvious at the time, Google was having some April Fool's Day fun with the Web, rolling out 3D in Street View at the same time. Today, 9 months from the next April Fool's Day, with an announcement that can filed in the "Huh?" category, Google has reintroduced 3D viewing in Google Books.