Google's new ebook service, Google Editions, reportedly will debut this month. Devin Coldewey on TechCrunch asks, "Is there room for another player" in the crowded ereader market of Kindle, Nook, iPad, and others.
I think in this case it may be that Google brings something new to the table: decentralization.
The advantages of not having to go through, for instance, Amazon, when selling your book, are hard to quantify. But the notion that an author will be able to place a widget on their own page, and have the book-buying transaction be self-contained rather than being transferred to Amazon, is significant. The attraction of being an independent node will be an attractive one for many to whom other e-book stores’ terms may not be permissive or customizable enough. As Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks Inc., an Illinois publisher, puts it, “Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book."