Google announced today that the company plans to give publishers a way to sell online digital versions of their books through a partner program. The new online bookstore is expected to be online with an inventory of thousands of books by the end of this year.
The announcement makes it obvious that Google is going into head-to-head competition with Amazon.com and its popular Kindle e-book reader. There will be one major difference between the two, however: unlike Amazon.com's proprietary format that only allows the reader to read books on the Kindle device or on an Apple iPhone, Google says that it is developing an open platform for reading and accessing books. This means that books from the Google bookstore can be read on any PC or Macintosh or any other device for which programmers will write Google-compatible software.
Given Google's popularity, I suspect that such software will appear for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, smart phones, tiny netbook computers, and perhaps even for a dedicated reading device.
This could be a boon for genealogy book publishers. The books in electronic format would presumably be much cheaper to produce than the same books printed on paper. The publishers presumably would pass on part of the savings to purchasers and pocket the rest. This could be a win-win for consumers and publishers alike.
Today's announcement was aimed more at publishers than at potential customers. The company apparently wants to produce a lot of books and have them available before the formal launch of the new eBookstore. I doubt if the new service will be available for at least six months.
