Yesterday, Google Books opened for U.S. residents. This is the long-awaited bookstore, although after a browse of it, I’m not sure why. The question that remains to be seen is whether this bookstore will be very competitive and whether it will challenge Amazon.
Also in yesterday’s news was the rumor/announcement that Borders, in conjunction with the private equity group that currently is keeping Borders afloat, plan to make a bid for Barnes & Noble. This will be interesting.
But the two bits of news really belong together.
Google Books has one thing going for it: it will be a way for independent bookstores to provide an ebook service to their customers. Powell’s in Portland, OR, has already indicated it will be partnering with Google Books. But a look at the Google bookstore doesn’t leave me chomping at the bit to buy books from it, whether print or ebooks.
Try finding customer service. I had difficulty finding it and, more importantly, had difficulty determining whether Google Books is a cloud-only service or a combined cloud-download service. The former I would never buy from (unless I absolutely had no choice) whereas the latter at least gives you the option of maintaining a copy of your purchase on your desktop. But what happens if I purchase a book only to discover after purchasing it that it is not downloadable, something that appears very easy to do at Google Books? Trying to get your money back and have the book removed from your cloud-based library looks to be a herculean task, in contrast to the ease of access to customer service at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and Sony, to name a few competitors.
There are lots of problems with Google Books. One would think that a company as resource-rich as Google would hire better specialty designers, but I guess even money doesn’t cure the hit-or-miss school of design.
Yet, I suspect that in the not too distant future most of us will become Googlers, that is, buyers of books via Google Books, unless we become Amazoners. I think that the foretold shakeout of the ebook retail industry has just begun. Here’s why and what I would do –
I’d like to be sitting on the cash — note it is cash — that Google is because I would now take the steps necessary to thwart Amazon and Apple’s ebook business. First thing I’d do is buy B&N. Google can do it for cash; Borders can’t compete, Jobs doesn’t believe in reading and so won’t compete, and Amazon could never buy B&N and get past antitrust concerns. And no matter what Leonard Riggio thinks, a serious bid for B&N by Google would be insurmountable by Riggio. It isn’t exactly like he has been such a great leader in recent years that private equity would simply line up and beg him to lead a takeover.
Second, I would put Borders out of its misery. Buy it and merge it into Google Books. The only real value to Borders is its customer list.
Third, I would approach Sony and offer a deal for its ebookstore. I doubt Sony could resist any reasonable offer, especially if Google made a deal to scrap the nook device and help Sony make its devices more price competitive. The reality is that the Sony devices are probably the best dedicated reader devices available except that they cost so much more than the Kindle, nook, and Kobo (and other third-party devices), they can’t get the kind of traction in market share they deserve. Combine Google financial power with Sony technology and suddenly you would see a truly competitive ebook market.
Finally, comes Kobo. The Kobo device isn’t something I would write home about; it’s OK but not a class leader. But the Kobo ebookstore is a different story. If the ebook race were to be decided simply on the quality of the ebookstore and customer service, the race would be between Amazon and Kobo, none of the other major players would even be a blip on the horizon. Kobo is aggressive and provides customer service at the vaunted Amazon level. So what I would do is see if I couldn’t partner with Kobo, perhaps pay a fee to bury the brand and merge it into the Google Books brand but have the Kobo personnel essentially run Google Books.
Ultimately, I think the only ebook bookstore survivors of the major brands will be Amazon, Google, and Kobo. Sony’s ebookstore isn’t bad, but Sony hasn’t got a clue how to promote either its reading devices or its ebookstore. B&N and Borders are mismanaged; B&N does do some great promoting but drops the ball after the promoting. Borders doesn’t seem to do anything right. Apple is really a nonentity as regards ebooks. It’s hard to become a real competitor when the only person who matters doesn’t believe in reading.
Google Books is the unknown in the lion’s den. Google certainly has the fiscal resources to take on Amazon, which is the key player today, but whether it has the vision and the stamina to do so remains to be seen. If we begin to see improvements in the Google bookstore, especially in customer service options, and see Google make moves to create a true competitor to Amazon, then many of us may well become Googlers. Until then, I think Google Books will be last in the race.
An interesting line of thought based on the wish that Google should gobble up everything ebook branded non-Amazon, cobble together the pieces and produce…Frankengoogle!
Not going to happen of course. The one most at risk is probably Kobo actually, at least as far as its global expansion plans is concerned.
Yeah, Google could shoot to the top of the industry if they purchase B&N.
But wouldn’t that logic apply equally well to pretty much any large, multinational company in the e-book game?
Take the nook, make it international and give it a cash infusion so they can produce a real advertising campaign. Now add either Sony’s hardware, Apple’s branding, Google’s cloud computing prowess, or kobo’s customer service and you have something Kindle can’t compete with.
Or, in Amazon’s case. Just buy the nook to kill it off and get rid of epub.
as long as Google reading is based so firmly in the cloud, I’ll stick with Amazon. It already makes me slightly queasy to have my reading of books dependent on the availability of electricity and Amazon continuing to support it’s drm (B&N is out forever for me when they decided not to continue to support their own early proprietary drm). To add an additional layer, being dependent on free fast access to the internet to do my reading is just one layer of complexity too many
As long as Google is based in the cloud and is America-only, they are nothing to write home about. Kobo’s big advantage is the local partnerships—the recent Giller story is an example, they actually sought out publishers of the short-listed books and offered to make e-versions for them, and then they found that these Canadian books outsold the recent Booker winner—Canadians wanted to read Canadian books! If they operate on a local level with their partners overseas (Whitcoull’s in AUS/NZ for example) in the same way when opportunity presents itself, they could be the killer store to beat.
I just went to google ebooks to see if a particular relatively obscure author was available, and if so was it a download or part of the cloud. Going through their process, I couldn’t find any indication in the book description, and google wanted me to enter credit card information before I could continue to the purchase point to see if that information was there. Since I had no intention of purchasing the book (it’s way overpriced, and I was only going to check on download/cloud status anyway), I quit the process. I’m not going to buy a pig in a poke, or give credit card information just to find out download status of a book.
The google ebook store is really not much different than any other Adobe DRM ebook store, except it has a ‘web only’ side and will likely have apps in the future (similiar to how B&N and Sony have them now). Other than that, if you have an ereader, you still have to have ADE compatible software installed on your computer so you can download an ePub. It’s the same way Kobo, Sony, and all the rest do it. So I don’t see much advantage in the google ebook store. I won’t be using it in the near future.
This sounds like just another Google “toy”. How soon before they cancel it because whomever came up with the idea left Google or became bored with it?
Also, I thought the goal was a universal, nonproprietary format, not a single ebook vendor using a drm’ed proprietary format?
“Kobo is aggressive and provides customer service at the vaunted Amazon level.”
There speaks somebody who’s never actually tried to deal with Kobo’s customer disservice department. Granted they aren’t quite as bad as post-B&N Fictionwise or Diesel, who avoid the question of customer service by simply ignoring all email coming to their CS addresses, but Kobo’s customer service is among the worst of any on-line retailer I’ve ever dealt with.
“There speaks somebody who’s never actually tried to deal with Kobo’s customer disservice department. Granted they aren’t quite as bad as post-B&N Fictionwise or Diesel, who avoid the question of customer service by simply ignoring all email coming to their CS addresses, but Kobo’s customer service is among the worst of any on-line retailer I’ve ever dealt with.”
Agree 100%
“as long as Google reading is based so firmly in the cloud, I’ll stick with Amazon. It already makes me slightly queasy to have my reading of books dependent on the availability of electricity and Amazon continuing to support its drm … To add an additional layer, being dependent on free fast access to the internet to do my reading is just one layer of complexity too many”
I think people are confused by the “in the cloud” thing – maybe Google over-hyped this feature. Amazon’s Kindle books are also “in the cloud”. (Amazon’s S3 service is cloud-based hosting).
Either way, you can download the books to your device and read them offline. Either way, you’re going to need electricity and an Internet connection (or Whispernet). Either way, you have to deal with DRM, unfortunately. But either way, if you lose your device or your local copy, you can download them again from “the cloud”.
It’s kind of funny to see Amazon becoming the scrappy underdog, though…
“Either way, you can download the books to your device and read them offline.”
Some of Google’s books have now download available and can only be viewed from the ‘cloud’.
Oops, that should be NO download available, not now.
@ Katherine – as others have said, not all google books can be downloaded. And, from my experience, they don’t tell you whether you can download them or have to read them from the cloud until you’ve actually purchased the book.
I guess I just haven’t come across any of the cloud-only books yet. Looking at http://books.google.com/help/ebooks/content.html, I see they say, “A small number of ebooks may not be enabled for download to your eReader due to limits set by the publisher; those ebooks will display an alert message (“No download files included”) before you purchase or get the ebook.” and “Many Google eBooks are protected under copyright law, and our publisher and author partners require us to protect them against unauthorized copying and abuse. These protections come in the form of digital rights management (DRM) and control your usage of your ebooks, such as the option to download ebooks as ePub and PDF files. These protections are specified by the publisher and Google is required to implement them. Some Google eBooks are completely free of digital rights management – they are either free public domain books, or the rightsholder has chosen to provide its readers full access to the content. In these cases you will be able to download DRM free ePubs or PDFs. For all other Google eBooks, we will implement rights management as required by publishers. Additionally, some publishers will limit the number of mobile readers that can download a specific book at a time, and will limit the number of concurrent reading sessions allowed for their content.”
I’ll grant that it’s confusing – a book is a book is a book, right? But the problem is that publishers insist on DRM and Google was willing to go along with all the conditions imposed in order to get a large collection of books.
Setting aside concerns about monopolies and such, I’m not sure that what they’re doing is particularly worse than anybody else. (I really like the iPad client, so far – very elegant and I’ve used it to download several un-DRM’d classics already)
If Google want me to pay full price for a product – and then tell me that … ooops I cannot actually take the product home and keep it for my own use, and my access to it depends on their whim … They must be NUTZ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, I wouldn’t willingly buy one of the online-only books. Hopefully they address that complaint – or use it as ammunition with whoever the lame copyright owner is. “See, nobody wants to buy your book because you won’t actually let them have it!” Can anyone post an example of an online-only book, though? I can’t find one yet.
Still, I’m not jumping on the bash-Google bandwagon just yet. Nobody has discussed one interesting feature – you can buy the books through your local bookstore and they’ll get some of the revenue. I like that part.
I use Google Books for research but I would not buy a book via the system after hearing several of my fellow writers complain about how their scanned/pirated books are being sold via that system, with no percentage going to the writer. Hopefully this issue is being weighed seriously by the folks at Google Books and dealt with in a timely fashion.
I don’t see Google buying physical bookstores. That is just not their business model. Now they may buy the ebook store and the devices, but NOT physical locations.
I Agree that Apple is NOT a player and we could end up wioth Google vs Amazon (with B&N and Borders swallowed up.