Google is building an empire on books. In addition to the 1.5 million books available on Google Books (gotta love public domain laws), Google is to start selling actual e-books to consumers, poising Google to be Amazon’s next big competition. Google plans to allow publishers to set the price for books, which they suspect will be around as much as new hardcover books cost. That’s not so bad, so bad as the books are DRM-free.
Any student is familiar with this problem: you’re looking for that one key quote to finish your paper the night before your paper is due. Too bad the book doesn’t have a search bar built in a la you web browser. If Google sells fully searchable PDF files, many a student will jump all over these books. But Google is going to have a far harder time selling anything to anyone if they charge more than Amazon and still are rocking the DRM (remember, Amazon takes the loss and sells books for Kindle much cheaper than they would otherwise be).
This piece is truly a “trends” story as this is the first time Google has delved into the consumer market. There has been talk that Google would experiment with premium content, but this is full on retail. Hopefully this will bring a little more “don’t be evil” to the retail space.
