GOOGLE OPENS EBOOK STORE
Google has just opened the doors to its eBookstore, taking on rivals like Amazon and Apple. The bookstore, dubbed Google eBooks, is the biggest one in the world with over three million titles and “hundreds of thousands” for sale, the company said. The store is designed as an “open” system, wrote product manager Abraham Murray in a blog post. This means all purchased books can be stored in the cloud, making it available on all sorts of devices. Google has also launched a dedicated app to shop and read on the go—no internet connection necessary. Over 4,000 publishers have made books available through Google, reports The New York Times.  Despite its size and the ubiquity of the Google brand, analysts are bearish about the eBookstore’s chances against the mighty Amazon.  “The Kindle brand is solid and their devices are super-elegant, very cheap now, and their bookstore is second to none as far as bookstores go,” Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey told Reuters, adding that Google has a “better chance” of unseating Barnes & Noble for second spot. And although Google eBooks marks a significant push into the e-retail market, but as Google might be typified as, money’s not everything. “Launching Google eBooks is an initial step toward giving you greater access to the vast variety of information and entertainment found in books,” wrote Murray.
Even analysts are homing in on that point. They believe that the revenue earned from selling books is secondary to the “breadth of online services [Google] will be able to provide”, reports Reuters.
(http://www.designtaxi.com/news/33568/Google-Opens-eBookstore-to-Challenge-Amazon-Apple/?page=1)