Google Editions scores deals with "nearly all" U.S. publishers

Although details about Google's forthcoming digital bookstore, Google Editions, are still hazy, at least we now know that it's going to have a huge number of books. Google has said that "nearly all" U.S. publishers will be included in the bookstore. Over 20,000 publishers and individual authors will be part of Editions, accounting for 2 million of the projected 4 million books on the site. The other 2 million books are older works that have fallen out of copyright and can now be offered by Google.

When I reported that Google Editions was slated to launch this summer, I said that the only thing it still needed to shake up the e-book market was deals with major publishers. Now it looks like Google has got that and more, so we're soon going to find out whether a (mostly) device-independent search-based e-book market will take a big chunk of business away from Amazon's Kindle store and Apple's iPad bookstore.

[via JapanToday]

Tags: books, ebooks, ereader, google, google editions, GoogleEditions, publishers