Today Google announced that it has opened its very own bookstore. Not one where you can get a cup of coffee, sit down and read through paper books, but an online bookstore. No, not like Amazon either. You can’t get books delivered to your house. It’s a store for e-books. And we are not just talking scanned books by Google here.
With over 3 million titles in store and with 4,000 publishers as partners Google has really made an effort here. Amongst the partners there are major industry names like Simon & Schuster and Penguin and the Oxford University Press and Reed Elsevier.
Google is also offering an affiliate program (yes, really, Google is going into affiliates, wonder how they will go and rank these). The affiliate network will run next to the publisher partnerships. With the affiliate network it should become possible to link to a book in a post, forum or other kind of article and have someone buy the book using Google Checkout right from the website.
Google is also releasing a dedicated eBook-reading app for Android devices. It also says it is “working on getting one into the iPhone store”.
The bookstore is available only in the U.S. for now, but is expected to roll out in Europe and other countries early next year.
See the introduction of E-Books in this video by Google on their blogpost (somehow they set that to ‘private’).