
Google eBooks: E-Reading Takes To The Cloud - davidedicillo
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/06/google-ebooks-e-reading-takes-to-the-cloud/
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pak
Hasn't Google been producing some very Microsoft-esque news as of late--they
join some product space late, with a product that doesn't really differentiate
itself except by having Google scale from the beginning? I'm just seeing this
as a increasingly frequent thing: Checkout, the Android Market, Buzz, Google
TV, HotPot, and now this... can't wait for Google Me or "the Facebook retort"
to come out and be completely underwhelming.

It seems at a certain point a large company cannot help but be more
reactionary than revolutionary, despite the culture and mantras and everything
else.

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revorad
I'm really pleased to see this particular product from Google though. Not
offering ebooks is weird for a company whose mission is organising the world's
information.

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keltex
The first book I see (Cross Fire by James Patterson) is $14.99 vs. $12.99 on
the Kindle.

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tmcw
"E-Reading Takes To The Cloud"

Sorry, what?

How is this any more cloud-y than a Kindle, or whatever also-ran B&N has, or
the iTunes books thing? Not to say that it isn't cool (personally, I'm
surprised it uses Adobe's eBook DRM format instead of something simpler and
more open), but the cloudiness of this is far less notable than the weird fact
that Google's getting into this industry.

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elblanco
So.... downside: books are more expensive, no support for the Kindle, "yet
another eReader"(TM) for all my devices, minimal support for common formats,
blah blah

upside: it syncs where you are between all your devices!

am I missing something here?

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robk
The attractiveness here is not the store, IMO, but the eReader access to their
deep back catalog of books they've scanned. Amazon and B&N keep their catalogs
full of paid content. Google's seems like it will have a great depth of their
own proprietary scanned material, which is appealing.

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RaRic
The first book I searched for (Guns, Germs and Steel) shows up in the auto
suggest, but not in the search results. Disappointing.

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hexis
Direct link to the ebooks - <http://books.google.com/ebooks>

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trotsky
Google taking 48 cents on the dollar unless you're a major publisher... ouch!

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gcb
Differently from kindle and other ebook apps, such as adilko, google goes
great lenghts, at least in this version, to hide the free content besides the
3 samples that it adds to your lib when starting

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gcb
let me correct myselft on this one. in the website they have a category for
"top free books". but otherwise, still a pain

how about some project guttenberg in the app search results? c'mon, you guys
are an overgrow search engine :)

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gcb
Every google app is above 1.5mb. That's really above the fold for most
categories of apps

