Google to sell eBooks by year's end

Google is reportedly planning to begin selling eBooks by the end of 2009. What's interesting is that Google won't be selling books in an old fashioned, downloadable format like PDF. Instead, the New York Times reports that readers would purchase books that could be read online.

You'd have offline access through "cached versions" in your browser. In other words, it looks like you'll be able to read eBooks in a browser and save them using Google Gears, which all sounds a lot more awkward and inconvenient than simply downloading a book that you can read on your smartphone, PDA, computer, or eBook reader. Google is trying to make this sound like a good thing, since you'll be able to access the site from any device with a web browser and internet access, but I'd rather have offline access and the ability to save my books to a hard drive or backup media.

Google also wants to differentiate itself from Amazon, which sets its own prices, by allowing publishers to set prices for digital editions of their books.

[via paidContent]

Tags: ebooks, google-books