Google Launching Bookstore This Summer

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Today at one of the hottest conferences around, the Book Industry Study Group (sarcasm), a Google manager, Chris Palma, announced at a panel that Google was going to begin selling digital books. The panel was dubbed “The book on Google: Is the Future of Publishing In the Cloud?” Google Books has toyed with the idea for a while as it allowed searching for books and provided some open-source books, but now, they’re going directly into selling them.

Google’s new bookstore will be called “Google Editions”, and to differentiate itself from the Kindle Store, iBooks, and whatever Barnes & Noble’s online eBook store is called, Google Editions will instead be platform-agnostic.

Users will be able to buy ‘digital books’ (Google is being very careful not to use the eBook name) via the Google Books search. Google will also allow retailers to sell Google Edition digital books on their website, 0f which, Google will only take a small percentage of the purchase price.

Tech pundits are identifying this as “Android’s Bookstore” while that could be true, Google really sounds like they’ve got their eyes on being a platform-agnostic bookstore. Success remains to be seen, though, as we’ve seen various websites that just sell PDF eBooks that are technically platform-agnostic, yet the masses flock to the Kindle Store or iBooks.

While the WSJ reports that book publishers haven’t signed on officially with Google Editions, they’re excited by it. Evan Schnittman, VP at Oxford University Press:

This levels the retail playing field. And as a publisher, what I like is that I won’t have to think about audiences based on devices. This is an electronic product that consumers can get anywhere as long as they have a Google account.

Do you think Google Editions is a good idea? Will you buy books through Google Editions?