Peter Osnos at The Atlantic has a piece looking at what is known about Google Editions. It mentions that Google says it’s inked deals with 35,000 publishers, and will have millions of titles to offer.
The e-books will be stored on Google’s cloud, and will support the same sort of pick-up-where-you-left-off capability as Amazon’s Kindle platform. It is not clear, at least from this article, whether in-copyright e-books will be able to be downloaded into e-book reader devices without direct Internet connectivity, however. (Surely they will, given how many people currently have such devices…right?)
Osnos also mentions Google’s cooperation with the American Booksellers Association to allow independent bookstores to sell Google e-books through their own websites.
It still isn’t exactly clear when Google Editions will launch. However, it will be fun to see what happens when it does.
