Google’s E-Books Store Will Start Off With Around 500,000 Titles

by admin October 15, 2009 at 5:54 pm

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is slowly rolling out details about its forthcoming online e-books store, which it is calling Google Editions. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany this week, the company said that the store—which will compete with Amazon’s rival offering—will launch in June 2010, according to Reuters and Bookseller.com reports. That’s a change from June, when Google’s Tom Turvey told publishers that the company would launch the store by the end of 2009. Unclear why there’s been a delay, especically considering that Turvey was particulary emphatic in announcing the date back then, saying, “This time we mean it.” (We’ve asked Google for clarification).

Some other new details about the effort, from the reports:

—Google Editions will start off with 500,000 titles. That’s more than Amazon’s Kindle, which claims to have “more than 350,000 books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs available.” The numbers, however, might not be comparable since Google could be counting the copyright-expired texts that it is already making available on some e-readers.

—Also unlike the Kindle, Google is emphasizing that Google Editions will be device-agnostic, meaning that the titles will be readable on any device with a browser. Users will also be able to access the texts they have purchased when they’re not connected to the internet via a cached version.

Read more: paidcontent.org