Amazon.com is making major strides in the e-book market, but another Internet giant seems poised to offer some healthy competition. Google is planning to enter the e-book market with a program that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their latest titles directly to consumers, according to The New York Times.
Google couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, but the Times reported the company held discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York during the weekend. During those discussions, Google reportedly signaled its intent to introduce an e-book store to compete with Amazon.
Google the E-Tailer
Amazon is working to dominate the e-book market through its Kindle reader, but some publishers are concerned that the e-tailer’s prices are too aggressive and may welcome Google if it sells digital books at better margins.
Amazon peddles best sellers, on average, for $9.99. That’s significantly less than the $26 at which bookstores typically sell hardcover editions. Google reportedly would allow publishers to set their own prices for e-books.
As Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret, said Amazon’s pricing strategy doesn’t hurt publishers. Amazon may sell the hard covers at $9.99 in digital format, he said, but Amazon takes a loss when publishers won’t lower their prices. What’s more, he said, the pricing strategy is vital to educating the market.
“The lesson we learned from iTunes is when you are trying to teach consumers a new paradigm, uniform pricing makes a lot of sense,” Gartenberg said. “Once you are five or six years down the road and you’ve taught consumers the notion of buying music at 99 cents and downloading it to your computer and transferring it to your phone or media player, you can get into things like variable pricing.”
Google vs Amazon
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