Google has officially declared war on Amazon for the e-book market supremacy. Unlike most companies involved in the e-book industry, Google does not have its own reader, but it has Sony and Coolerreads. Google and Amazon have been at it for a while now. Amazon is not a big fan of Google Books project. In fact, there are some giants (Microsoft and Yahoo) among the opposition. But that hasn’t stopped Google from trying to take over the world. Google has given a hand to Sony by bringing over a million titles to Sony store. Now Interead also gets a chance to use those books on its own e-book reader, Cool-er.
Cool-er reader is a cool looking e-book reader that does look a bit like a giant iPod, and it supports 19 formats including popular doc formats such as ePub and PDF. By partnering up with Cool-er reader and Sony, Google is sending a signal to Amazon that it has no intention of backing down in the e-book industry. It’s true that those million titles are all books in public domain, but that doesn’t take too much away from the fact that Sony and Interead customers will have many new titles to consume on their e-book readers.
It’s still not clear how Amazon will respond to Google’s latest attempt in the e-book industry. The company is trying to stop Google in its tracks with the help of companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon is thinking about adopting some of those other document formats that we have come to love. At the end of the day, most of the e-book readers on the market won’t be a threat to Amazon Kindle. By adopting some of those popular document formats, Amazon can raise the stakes in e-book industry wars. One thing is for certain. When companies compete, consumers win.
Your take: is Google the king maker in the e-book industry?
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0 comments
#1JohnSeptember 4, 2009, 12:22 am
Actually, Amazon has one thing it could do. It could let everyone know that the .azw format is really just a .mobi format with a different extension. You can download tens (or hundreds) of thousands of free e-books from Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.com/ and http://worldebookfair.org/Collections.htm) in the .mobi format and simply change the extension to .azw. Instantly they are readable on the Kindle.
Why does Amazon keep this a secret? Good question. It is a way to instantly make a whole lot of e-books available to their customers (without any profit going to Amazon… hmmm, I think I figured out why they keep this a secret).
#2John HagewoodSeptember 4, 2009, 2:39 pm
You don’t have to change the description to AZW, they work fine with the mobi or the prc extension, as long as they are DRM Mobipocket. You can just drag-n-drop them over to the documents folder on the kindle from your computer and there they are.
In fact, you can directly download files with the mobi extension from sites like http://manybooks.net/ and http://www.smashwords.com/ directly from the Kindle using the “experimental browser”. Once they are finished downloading they “appear” in your book list.
Can’t blame Amazon for not advertising this kind of thing, though…after all they are trying to sell ebooks!
#3JohnSeptember 7, 2009, 12:58 am
You’re right, you don’t need to rename the file… you can simply leave it .mobi. Thanks for the tip. That just saved me one step.
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