Screen shot 2011-01-13 at 10.20.08 AM.pngTechCrunch broke the story earlier today that Google has just snapped up a tiny firm called Ebook Technologies that has produced, among other ebook-related tools, software for managing the distribution of ebooks.

The description of the company’s products are a little on the vague corporate-speak side, but it sounds a little like they build the software for a type of ebook distribution system/portal.

Given that some of the tech that Google acquires never sees the light of day, none of this is set in stone. Far from it. But it does hint at an expanded ebookstore ecosystem.

If I had to guess, I’d say that this is pointing toward Google setting up a user-friendly “portal” system where publishers and/or distributors can feed their lists and new books into the ebookstore ecosystem.

Of course, this is already happening, but I hear that it is far from a user-friendly process at the moment, involving multiple techs integrating systems that aren’t built to play nice with each other.

For Google’s digital, go-anywhere, read-anywhere ecosystem to really flourish and become the go-to industry standard, they would need an easy portal system for existing and new distributors (and probably, ultimately, publishers) to digitally feed in their titles.

This could (and I stress could) be the missing piece of that tech puzzle.

In any case, I think that if this happens, publishers will eventually need to change their businesses dramatically, or disappear.

Via Jason Davis’ BookBee site

1 COMMENT

  1. This could be more important than Jason thinks. See Nate’s post for why:

    “Garth Conboy, President and co-founder of ETI, used to run the Gemstar eBook Group (before Gemstar went bankrupt). He was even part of Nuvomedia back before Gemstar bought it. Basically Google just got themselves a Wright brother and his team (who is also a serial entrepreneur). Garth is also the current head of the IDPF (the digital publishing trade group), which should give you an idea about his pull in the industry.”

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