Google online service for booksellers to rival Kindle

GOOGLE is launching a new online service for booksellers next year called Google Editions, which will let readers buy books and read them on gadgets ranging from cell phones to possibly e-book devices.

It’s the first foray into charging for books for the Mountain View, California-based company, which began its Google Books program in 2004, and will put it in competition with Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle reader.

Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search’s publisher partnership program, said the price per book would be set by their publishers and would start with between 400,000 to 600,000 books in the first half of 2010.

“It will be a browser-based access,” Turvey said Thursday at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair. “The way the e-book market will evolve is by accessing the book from anywhere, from an access point of view and also from a geographical point of view.”

The books bought from Google, and its partners, would be accessible on any gadget that has a web browser, including smartphones, netbooks and personal computers and laptops. A book would be accessible offline after the first time it was accessed.

Google will collect 55% of the profits, Turvey said, giving a “vast majority” of that to retailers, and the rest will go to the publisher.

He added that Google Editions will be the first time the company will try to monetise their books project.

In 2008, US e-book sales totalled $113 million (€75m) – up 68% from 2007 but still a fraction of the estimated $24.3 billion spent on all books, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Also yesterday, a Google executive responded to criticism from the German government, saying that there had been a “misunderstanding” regarding book copyrights as the firm works to make books available online.

David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said: “We never scan copyright-protected books in Europe. We recognise that in each country the ultimate design could be different. People think we scan copyright-protected books. That’s false.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the internet carries “significant dangers” for the rights of authors.

“For the (German) government, it is clear that copyright also must find its place on the internet,” she said. “That is why we reject books simply being scanned in without any copyright protection, as is being done by Google.”

Drummond said at the press conference that Google Books is using the US ‘Fair-Use’ principle as its guide in the states.