Google eBooks Launched

With an initial inventory of more than 3 million titles, Google eBooks officially launched this morning, becoming the largest bookstore in the world virtually overnight. And with some 4000 publishers participating initially, its inventory will only grow. Formerly known as Google Editions, Google's newest online venture changed its name on launch in order to better reflect its content - and rightly so: Google Editions always sounded too much like an imprint of a physical publishing house to me.

But ebooks is what Google's new ebookstore is all about. And its approach is entirely new. While digital copies purchased via Google eBooks - or any of its rapidly growing infantry of retailers (including the social book site Goodreads) - can be downloaded for use offline, purchased titles are also stored in the "digital cloud," where they are accessible by the buyer at any time on any device with a web browser, including the iPad, Nook, Sony Reader or smartphone of your choice (although not the Kindle - while it features an experimental browser, it doesn't support Adobe's ACS4 encryption technology, used to secure each user's account). In addition, to increase the convenience of its digital editions, Google will soon introduce both iOS and Android apps which will sync with your customer account, allowing you to read a few pages on one device, and then pick up where you left off on another.

While browsing titles in the old Google Books, you will now see a new button in the left column with the option to purchase a Google eBook edition. Click the image to view The Saga of Beowulf page there, or here to see the page in the new Google ebookstore. The price is currently $9.99, which is the standard Google ebook discount of 80% off the print edition, but I've changed this to $4.99 to match the price I currently have listed for the Kindle edition, so this should update fairly soon.

For those interested, Google's revenue share is dependent on how the author/publisher sets up their title inventory. For agency-model publishers (the vast majority), where the publisher sets the list price, Google offers the now-standard 70% royalty, whereas for the wholesale model only 52% is passed on to the publisher. I'm guessing this is because most agency-model publishers set as high a price as they can, much higher than what Google would set themselves. But self-published authors can decide for themselves what works best.

UPDATE:

Under the wholesale model, publishers split the proceeds with the retailer 63/37%, with Google taking 10% off the top. The split under the agency model is 70% for the publisher, with 20% to the retailer and 10% to Google (which may, of course, both be Google).

Here's a video announcing the launch: