By the way, PC World says Google will have 500k books at launch, not 4 million:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/19556...ly_summer.html
They also didn't have any (public/confirmed) publisher commitments as recently as May 4:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...417931818.html
In fact, everything I'm seeing about this alleged "4 million books, half provided by publishers" not only sounds highly improbable, it only has one source: one article in Japan Today. I'm not even seeing an official press release on Google Editions. So, I think I'm gonna have to doubt this figure and claim until it's officially confirmed.
It is a good thing that they've made lots of public domain titles available, but the poor quality of those texts, they certainly hasn't earned much faith when it comes to upcoming ebook quality.
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Originally Posted by David Marseilles
Not giving Google the benefit of the doubt with commercial titles because they dared offer a fairly unique (for a corporation that is; hat tip to gutenburg) solution on older materials is quite unreasonable.
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Good, because that's not what I'm doing.
Legalities aside, Google poured significant resources into their book scanning project, and captured millions of titles that way. I have no doubt that is the source of a very large number of books they will sell, and there is no reason to imagine that anything captured by that project will be of better quality than what is currently available. Nor will they have access to any source material that isn't used for other formats / retailers.
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Originally Posted by David Marseilles
On the contrary, Google has always gone above and beyond and there's no reason to expect any different as they move forward with a mainstream bookstore.
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Above and beyond, eh? *cough* Dejanews *cough* Orkut *cough cough*
Google, for all their virtues, are basically a bunch of engineers who also have the capital to buy neat toys. Half of their Cool Stuff were acquisitions -- SketchUp, Google Earth, Picasa etc. Oh, and as Business Insider points out, in case you have any doubt where Google's revenue comes from....
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Originally Posted by David Marseilles
I for one, can't wait. I hope it's not cloud-only, just cloud enhanced, but time will tell.
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It will have offline caching, but I wouldn't expect too much more than that. Google loves the cloud. I'm also sure that, much like Amazon or Apple, they can yank a title at any time if it was necessary.
And don't forget, pretty much everything you do that's connected to Google is another information stream to them, largely to feed their advertising services. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just keep it in mind.