Google might as well sign the death certificate for conventional paper books and publications, having recently reached agreements with 25,000 publishers and authors. Apparently, they’re readying a huge archive of digital books, competing with Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s huge title list.
Google Editions is the way these digital books will be available, with over 4 million titles ready for launch and the search engine giant claiming to have digitized 10 million books already in its Books database. Meanwhile, the iPad is going strong, as far as sales are concerned and we’re really curious to see which devices will support Google’s service.
As far as we know, Editions will be available on Addroid phones and tablets, but it might expand to other platforms and do for books what iTunes has done for music. Google’s initiative could be the beginning of a new era and possibly revive the e-reader segment, that took a hit over the past years.
[via Phandroid]
