Google Launches eBookstore

Google launched its new Google eBookstore on December 6, 2010, also offering a new Google web reader with free apps for Apple and Android.

Google has also partnered indy bookstores Powell’s, Alibris, and set of participating members — currently 220 stores — of the American Booksellers Association, allowing the booksellers to sell Google eBooks on their own websites. Publishers will get 70% of revenue, and sellers will share the remaining 30% with Google in an as-yet undisclosed split. Michael Tucker, president of the American Booksellers Association in Tarrytown NY, says, “We think this will be a boon for independent booksellers to offer customers digital format books. We wanted to [join the e-book market], but we had no ability to do that until now.”

Abraham Murray, product manager of Google Books, has stated in a public post that Google now offers more than three million titles, hundreds of thousands of which are for sale in the Google eBookstore. Murray also states that since the Google Books launch in 2004, Google has “digitized more than 15 million books from more than 35,000 publishers, more than 40 libraries, and more than 100 countries in more than 400 languages.”