Back in my day, we used to have to read books from an Amazon Kindle. Silly little things.
On Monday, Google launched its eBookstore, expecting to give Amazon a run for its money on the virtual book market. With promises of unexplored convenience and accessibility, the eBookstore contains approximately 3 million titles in a myriad of genres. Unlike the aforementioned Kindle, Google eBooks users are able to download their books wherever they’d like, and to whichever device is more available to them at the time. For example, if you start reading a book at home on your desktop, you can leave for work, and continue right where you left off using your iPad or smartphone. The idea here being that not only do you have one of the largest libraries on earth in your pocket; you also have it in a subway, at your workplace, or at your son’s little league baseball game. The possibilities (as has become the cliché of all Google’s campaigns) are truly endless.
While digital books are not exactly “ground-breaking” by any means, Google has big plans for eBooks. If the company can get approval over a class-action settlement with U.S. authors and publishers, it would have the right to offer upwards of 130 million titles to its users. However, this will be no easy task if Amazon has something to say about it. In a clever marketing scheme, Google offers eBooks compatibility to all e-book reading devices, except for Amazon’s Kindle. Amazon fears that Google has plans to monopolize the still-young virtual book market, and is willing to do anything in its power to prevent the proposed settlement from being approved.
Whether Amazon has the ability to do such a thing is yet to be determined, but it’s fair to assume Google will win this battle in the end. So, with this in mind, Google’s eBookstore inches us one step further to a world where paper books are a thing of the past. How will this soon-to-be-reality affect your business? How will all of this shape the future of advertising through digital media?
Stay tuned…
This blog post was provided by Break Media Group. Follow all of our news at breakmediagroup.com/blog or on Twitter at twitter.com/BreakMediaGroup. You can also follow the author at twitter.com/AnthonyBMG. Break Media Group: Where a promise is a promise.”