Back in December, David Rothman speculated that a tablet might be a good next move for Google. In February, Google showed some conceptual images of what a Google tablet might look like.
Now the New York Times reports that a Google tablet is imminent:
Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, told friends at a recent party in Los Angeles about the new device, which would exclusively run the Android operating system. People with direct knowledge of the project — who did not want to be named because they said they were unauthorized to speak publicly about the device — said the company had been experimenting in “stealth mode” with a few publishers to explore delivery of books, magazines and other content on a tablet.
The article covers other companies’ tablet plans as well, but Google’s is the big news. It’s a natural fit, given Google’s vast library of public-domain and impending library of in-copyright titles. And Google may be one of the few companies that could go head-to-head against Apple.
On the other hand, its Android phones have not captured anywhere near the marketshare of the iPhone yet, and a similar fate might be in store for a Google Android-powered tablet. Certainly there are a number of other Android-powered tablets either planned or already available, and none of them has set the world on fire yet.
It’ll be interesting to see how google does this. If it is like google books online and you are dealing with just an image of a page of text, it’ll not be good. Readers more now then they have before want to be engaged with the text, highlight, notes, tweet a line. If they are solely just reading the book, then an image is fine, but nowadays, readers are becoming more hands on with what they read, as they should, so companies need to recognize this and realized that an image is just that, an image, hard to highlight text on a picture and honestly, it’s boring and becoming outdated.
Erik
Erik: I’d hope Google would go far beyond just images of text.
Everyone: Credit to David Wilk–whose tablet reference I mentioned in the earlier TeleRead post.
Thanks,
David
Google Micropayment, Google Books, Google Tablet — seems to make a lot of sense to me. Ifd they do the first thing right, the second falls into place and the Tablet is a shoe-in.
The way they’re is headed, collecting and marketing user eyeballs and data, Google might end up renaming themselves UET. 😉
(With apologies to FM Busby)