Google eBooks: E-Reading Takes To The Cloud

Hasn't Google been producing some very Microsoft-esque news as of late--they join some product space late, with a product that doesn't really differentiate itself except by having Google scale from the beginning? I'm just seeing this as a increasingly frequent thing: Checkout, the Android Market, Buzz, Google TV, HotPot, and now this... can't wait for Google Me or "the Facebook retort" to come out and be completely underwhelming.

It seems at a certain point a large company cannot help but be more reactionary than revolutionary, despite the culture and mantras and everything else.

The first book I see (Cross Fire by James Patterson) is $14.99 vs. $12.99 on the Kindle.

"E-Reading Takes To The Cloud"

Sorry, what?

How is this any more cloud-y than a Kindle, or whatever also-ran B&N has, or the iTunes books thing? Not to say that it isn't cool (personally, I'm surprised it uses Adobe's eBook DRM format instead of something simpler and more open), but the cloudiness of this is far less notable than the weird fact that Google's getting into this industry.

So.... downside: books are more expensive, no support for the Kindle, "yet another eReader"(TM) for all my devices, minimal support for common formats, blah blah

upside: it syncs where you are between all your devices!

am I missing something here?

The attractiveness here is not the store, IMO, but the eReader access to their deep back catalog of books they've scanned. Amazon and B&N keep their catalogs full of paid content. Google's seems like it will have a great depth of their own proprietary scanned material, which is appealing.

The first book I searched for (Guns, Germs and Steel) shows up in the auto suggest, but not in the search results. Disappointing.

Direct link to the ebooks - http://books.google.com/ebooks

Google taking 48 cents on the dollar unless you're a major publisher... ouch!

Differently from kindle and other ebook apps, such as adilko, google goes great lenghts, at least in this version, to hide the free content besides the 3 samples that it adds to your lib when starting

Every google app is above 1.5mb. That's really above the fold for most categories of apps