[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

Oh goodie, the big day is finally here. According to a report in today's Sunday Times, Google, along with their pals from the publishing industry, are planning to launch an e-book retail platform.

First thing that makes me feel uneasy is this quote from the Times:

GOOGLE and some of the world’s top publishers are working on plans that they hope could do for books what Apple’s iPod has done for music.

Which to me means "they are going to claim rights over the content that do not exist under law, lock up the content so that users can't copy excerpts and make it hard to read the eBook."

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, is quoted saying that the platform serves as an extension to Google Book Search and targets customers who seek to have online access to e-books with their mobile devices such as the BlackBerry. Beside purchasing books you can also just rent them (such as a travel guide) or buy individual chapters.

This also makes me uneasy. It seems that you will require some sort of network connection on your eBook reader to get content. This would make such a service pretty much worthless.

"Rent" means that they will require very restrictive DRM - meaning that they will support only restrictive platforms to read the content on. Or, you will only be able to view the content through a browser that has done something with the content to render it unusable.

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

My only question is about the usefulness of having online access to books. Mr. Redmer does not mention whether or not you can download purchased e-books and read them offline on your reading device. For me, the latter is a prerequisite for this project to succeed. Also: No comments about the supported e-book format.

Which brings me to the last thing that makes me uneasy: the unsaid things.

The vision that I see when I read about this is that it's browser-based eBook service. Each page is delivered separately to your device (i.e. turning the page will require a network connection). The "page" is delivered as a graphic, making it very difficult to do anything with it.