Google eBookstore seems to have been launched | Hacker News Reader

Google eBookstore seems to have been launched

books.google.com

25 pointseitland33 comments

I, speaking as a consumer, love this.

When iBooks was released, I almost gave up hope on ebooks, as Apple's platform dominance could squash competition.

But as Amazon has expanded their offering with their same price model, and Google and other "players" are moving in, competition will drive down prices a la physical books (or at least I hope).

This thing launched in late 2010 http://thenextweb.com/google/2010/12/06/google-launches-its-...

Tried searching for a book, search field has auto-suggest, selected the title I want and got 300 completely irrelevant results.

Probably you are outside of the US, like me. In this case search returns only public domain results.

Seems to me what we are seeing is a glitch. Can't confirm but the lack of titles in important categories points clearly in that direction.

They also seem to be promoting an ereader from iRiver: http://books.google.com/help/ebooks/ereader.html

The specs are similar to the kindle keyboard, but costs less ($99 without ads) and has a better resolution 768x1024 vs kindle's 600x800. I hate that clunky turn-page button in the middle though.

They launched this a year ago. What has changed?

The change is that you can buy books now. Previously there were only free ones that were out of copyright.

I bought a book, Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Death by Black Hole, from Google Books when it launched a year ago.

You definitely have been able to buy ebooks for a long time. Are you talking about paper books?

Really? I thought it was only free books. Might be wrong, I use Kindle mostly.

How out of touch is Google? From: http://books.google.com/help/ebooks/ios.html

"Recommended for iPhones with 256MB memory or above"

That's an easy way to confuse a set of customers that either don't know or don't care about how much RAM their iPhone has. Why couldn't Google just list the models that are compatible? Maybe their Android world of specs has clouded their judgement.

Maybe with Android that list is too long?

> Google and authorised resellers have the discretion to set prices as they see fit. We will share the revenue from any sales with you according to the list price that you provide.

http://books.google.com/support/partner/bin/answer.py?hl=en-...

At a guess I would say that publishers will not like this one bit.

think I might have misread this apologies.

Prices are high. Everything I've looked up seemed high, and everything I bought recently from Kindle was cheaper there, then and now.

What angers me most is not the high prices, but that so little goes to the author. It's not only greedy bankers who are ruining the world for the rest of us.

I agree that more should go to the author but following an author friend on Twitter going through the editing of his third novel, I've been amazed by how much editing and fact checking is done by the publisher (or rather the editor on behalf of the publisher).

They've pulled him up on everything from one character removing the wrong persons trousers (seriously), to commentary about when things were overwrought to picking him up on mentioning a TV show that hadn't screened at the time. And that's just a selection of the bits he mentioned, I'm fairly certain there's a shed load more that were less remarkable and amusing.

Writing may be a solo pursuit but getting a book in a finished form and getting it to market takes more effort from more people than is apparent to most of us I think and that's all got to be paid for by someone.

Obviously an author could contract directly with a copy editor but there are issues with that, from having to provide the money up front to the fact that once you the author are paying them they're less likely to give you honest feedback for fear they won't get work in the future.

The current publishing model is, like most businesses, flabby, but we need to be careful not to assume that there's no value there.

Great point and I would expect copy editors to be the real losers if things were to change, since people assume anyone could be an editor, even their 10 year old daughter.

If the middlemen weren't providing a service, authors wouldn't use them. At least, if they had any sense.

I agree that it seems like they get a pittance, but that is their choice. You can chain yourself to the monster and get a lot of money, but only a small % of the total money made...

Or you could go it alone and get a huge % of the total money, but only a small amount of money total. Unless you're really awesome, and then this way would seem to be better in every regard.

From what I can tell, Stephen King played with self-publishing for a bit, but didn't follow through with it. Why? I couldn't find a reason, but it was over 10 years ago that he first tried it, and he's still using established publishers.

I suspect it's because they take care of SO much stuff that it's cheaper and easier for him to let them handle that, and he can do what he does best: Write books. Of course, he probably also gets better deals than Joe Average, but most of the major writers will.

My guess is that if Stephen King couldn't make it work with a massive installed fan base and a global reputation then it's a non-starter (or at least a very tall order) for an author who has neither of those.

If Stephen King were still self-publishing, Under the Dome would have been 500 pages longer than it already is. Thank God there's an editor to tell him to keep it "short".

Also, there were speculations a few months ago that J.K. Rowling was planning to do something interesting with electronic versions of her books. [1] I can't find any follow-up on this, but this could be worth watching out for. Perhaps nobody cared when King played with self-publishing many years ago, but these days people might pay attention to a well-known author doing self- something.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693384

Authors always have the option to self publish, and this is becoming increasingly easy to do with ebooks/pod.

Prices in the UK are super high, and there are some really strange device limitations (e.g. Can view on ipad but not the iphone). The application is really flaky as well. I'm afraid compared to ibooks and Kindle apps it just isn't up to anything much.

Google should try ad-based books and disrupt Amazon. What do they hope to accomplish by offering the exact same service as Amazon, but with fewer titles and higher prices? They are not even being competitive, let alone disruptive.

Amazon is already doing this. No disruption required.

Amazon has reduced Kindle costs supported by ads but I'm not aware of any ad supported books.

No, but it's a pretty small step. There's another startup doing it already: 24symbols.com

Google has an android app so you can read the books on your phone. But its not available in the UK.

Doesn't tell me clearly whether the book is DRM'd or not == no sale.

That was the first thing I tried to check, too. After Amazon's "1984" remote-deletion incident, I wouldn't touch an eBook with DRM.

How many years did it take for major online music stores to start offering DRM-free MP3s? I wonder if it will take longer or shorter in the eBook market.

Adobe provides the backend infrastructure for this and every other service except for Amazon. And yes, they have DRM but its trivial to circumvent with the proper tools. But consider the independent book stores that might stay open a little longer if you suggest they get with the program. I mention this because a longtime friend of mine opened her store 5 years ago and now that occasional Harry Potter release is not something she can rely on, she found Google's reseller program super easy to set up, maintain, and integrate with her main & mobile web sites. Look up St Johns Bookseller if you're curious.

This has been live for 3-6 months now.

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