KNOW THIS: Booksellers to Benefit from Google eBooks
December 6, 2010
Other articles in this Know Something Project series:
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Scribd (May 2010)
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Apple, Inc. (June 2010)
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Amazon.com (June 2010)
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Barnes & Noble, Inc. (June 2010)
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Sony, Google...and Wattpad? (July 2010)
In the digital age, bookselling is hardly limited to the traditional selling of print books in brick-and-mortar establishments. As more e-books are sold to consumers who read on a wide variety of gadgets, traditional retailers are searching for ways to profit from such sales on-line. With most e-book sales (65% according to The Wall Street Journal) currently made through Amazon’s proprietary Kindle Store, however, it seems independent booksellers have little chance to jump on this bandwagon at all.
Unless they opt to partner with Google eBooks. Originally scheduled to launch this past summer, Google eBooks debuted today, with an international launch probable in early 2011. Basically a very well-stocked on-line bookstore with access to the millions of public domain titles and thousands of fully searchable current titles already available on Google Books (with more to come thanks to recent deals signed with publishers worldwide), Google eBooks will sell e-books directly. But it will also offer independent booksellers an opportunity to profit from sales of e-books for the first time…simply because they recommend lots of titles to consumers on a regular basis.
What Booksellers Want
Though independent-minded booksellers and authors protested loudly when Google first announced its plans to digitally reproduce millions of books and make them available (many for free since they were no longer under copyright) on-line, booksellers anxious to find new ways to stay in business will likely find Google offers a good—and easy—way to profit from e-books.
On December 3, the San Francisco Chronicle featured local bookseller Michael Tucker in a story entitled “Google E-book Venture to Level the Playing Field.” Co-founder and CEO of Books Inc., Tucker is also the current president of the American Booksellers Association. According to Tucker, Google eBooks will provide a welcome way for independent booksellers to compete much more effectively with on-line retailers.
And the ABA is set up to help. More than 200 independent booksellers are already on board with IndieCommerce, the ABA’s e-commerce platform that allows retailers to direct consumers to their stores’ “personal” on-line sales sites…sites that can easily be tied directly to Google eBooks content.
As Abraham Murray, product manager at Google Books, told The Bookseller earlier this year, “We are enabling booksellers to sell the content instead of going out of business…. Nobody else is giving the bookseller a chance as we move to e-books.”
In a story run in the Duluth News Tribune last week on the possible closing of Northern Lights Books & Gifts, store owner Anita Zager suggests booksellers need to be able to sell e-books to their customers in order to stay competitive. “It’s kind of a Gutenberg moment,” she’s quoted as saying.
Surely Murray and others would call the launch of Google eBooks a quintessential Google moment.
—Karen DeGroot Carter
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