What Google Selling eBooks means
It was a big day in Boston yesterday with the announcement of eInk being acquired by PVI, but I was more surprised by another feature about Google taking on Amazon with their own book-selling plan.
eInk’s technology has brought to life the use of the personal electronic book readers, creating users who are looking for content to fill their new devices. As I think about the traditional customer flow, most users purchase their readers from online retailers like Amazon and I would expect they have highly optimized the shopping path ensuring purchasers add books, magazine and subscriptions into the cart at the same time.
With Google’s entrance into this market, it raises a couple of flags for me:
- Google is known for search, not for ecommerce. While Google has made tremendous advances in the area of search, I am perplexed why they would enter the ebook online business. While their book scanning project has been a tremendous success in making several out of print and new publications available online, I am not sure the same users see Google as a place to purchase content.
- Google seeks to disconnect user from original purchase. A key lesson learned from Apple, is the need to create a store front to fill your digital device (e.g., iTunes). While in the past few years, entertainment files have quickly comoditize, it difficult to get users to move away from their original purchase vendor to find content. To me, in a young device market like eReaders, it seems like a large leap to get customers to move to another online outlet to fill their device.
While these concerns outline why Google should not enter the ebook business, I do see tremendous opportunity for Google to capitalize on self-publishers. Like their Blogger acquisition, Google can foster an environment allowing authors to promote their books and generate revenue. To me, this could fuel a new movement back to traditional book writing, where prolific authors can cut out the publisher, activate self-promotion, sell their books and build online followings.
Regardless of concerns listed above, it will be intersting to see Google take on Amazon in the ebook business and how it will disrupt their business model. In any case, we can look to Amazon’s entrance into the music business and see how they have disrupted Apple’s control of rights management and cost of music as an example.
