The Wall Street Journal reports that unnamed “people close to the company” say that Google will launch its new Google Editions e-book store by the end of the year. The store had been delayed from an anticipated summer launch date by technical and legal matters, but the Journal’s sources say it has managed to clear those up and has been busy lining up contracts with independent booksellers and trading files back and forth with publishers.

Unlike other stores, Google wants to offer a “read-anywhere” model that will let readers access their e-books on almost any platform with a web browser. (It’s not clear how DRM will play into this.) And independent booksellers are going to form a major part of Google’s sales network, selling e-books through their websites and taking a cut of the proceeds. It could be a way to broaden Google’s store’s reach, and also let bookstores take a cut of the money being made in the e-book world.

And Google also plans to make it easier for blogs and other Internet sites to sell books themselves.

"Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book," says Dominique Raccah, publisher and owner of Sourcebooks Inc., an independent publisher based in Naperville, Ill. "The Google model is going to drive a lot of sales. We think they could get 20% of the e-book market very fast."

PaidContent seems to have its own sources, and is saying that Google Editions will launch with 500,000 titles—which is considerably more than the 350,000 “books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs” Amazon has to offer. However, Google’s number may count the public-domain titles it has already made available on some readers (much the way Barnes & Noble used them to inflate the count of Nook books).

In a possibly-related matter, TechCrunch reports that Google has suddenly engaged in a big push to complete its Chrome Web Store, possibly for a launch of its own by the end of the year. A number of store-related issues in the development forums for Chromium, the development version of the Chrome web browser, have suddenly started seeing significant activity, and related matters are also seeing attention.

The Chrome Web Store was supposed to launch in October, but like Google Editions, has seen some delay. It’s curious to see signs that two related Google projects are going to launch by the end of the year. Perhaps the Chrome Web Store is going to power Google Editions, or at least feature a way to buy Google Editions books?

It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. As the WSJ article notes, by delaying its store this long Google has lost a lot of early-mover advantage. Many e-book consumers are already “locked in” to other preferred e-book stores, and it’s unclear how well Google’s size and reputation can overcome this disadvantage. Will Google be able to dethrone Amazon? We’ll just have to wait and see.

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