Watch out Amazon and Kobo, Google wants its slice of Canada’s ebook retail market.
Google’s eBookstore is now open to Canadian customers, offering hundreds of thousands of books for sale and upwards of 2 million free public-domain titles.
Google has already struck deals with Canadian publishers big (Penguin, Random House, and Harper Collins) and small (Douglas & McIntyre, House of Anansi Press, and Dundurn) and hopes to partner with independent book retailers here, allowing them to sell books through the eBookstore for a cut of the profits.
How Google treats Canadian authors, publishers, and retailers will be worth tracking, though. The company is currently involved in legal disputes with the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild over its Google Library project, for which it digitized millions of books. The organizations claimed Google was sharing copyrighted material and failed to properly compensate writers and publishers. They reached a deal in 2008, but earlier this year a judge rejected it. The settlement administration website for the Authors Guild’s suit indicates that it has been stalled since March.
EBookstore content is readable on Android smartphone and tablets, Apple’s iPads and iPhones, and on Kobo, Sony’s E-Reader, and Nook devices, as well as on personal computers (see the full list of supported devices). Notably, books purchased from the eBookstore are not readable on Amazon’s Kindle devices, though Google says they are “open to supporting them in the future.”
After a summer when I worked almost every morning while the rest of the house was still sleeping and every weekend, I have decided NO MORE! My goal for 2012 is to stay as far away from the computer as possible outside normal working hours and on weekends, and to try and find better-paying clients to make up the shortfall. Wish me luck!
2 comments
After a summer when I worked almost every morning while the rest of the house was still sleeping and every weekend, I have decided NO MORE! My goal for 2012 is to stay as far away from the computer as possible outside normal working hours and on weekends, and to try and find better-paying clients to make up the shortfall. Wish me luck!
Thanks for the comment, and good luck, Nicole!