Google Books

 

http://books.google.com/help/ebooks/overview.html

 

Google announced new mobile editions of 1.5 million public domain books. Kindle is not supported ofcourse. iPhone and Android users now have access to five times the number of titles currently available on Kindle. Is this the beginning of end for Amazon. The major challenge is getting the content itself. This is a struggle for Amazon too. Gadget fans will clearly swoon over Kindle 2 but the real story is the growing competition between Google and Amazon in the digital book arena. Google want their data suppliers (publishers, writers, developers, news syndicates) in their long tail environment to make very little money to nothing at all. Amazon has a very strong proven track record establishing solid models for its business partners. Amazon has an embedded install base for the last couple of years.  Most passionate (the ones who spend the most money) e-reading users have jumped in. Amazon’s environment and their incentives demonstrated to the big name publishers and business owners how to make a solid consistent income year after year without being squeezed. Let’s see who wins the race.