In a move that could signal an expansion of its e-book strategy, Google has purchased the online publishing company eBook Technologies. Terms of the deal were not announced.
In a note on its web site, eBook said “working together with Google will further our commitment to providing a first-class reading experience on emerging tablets, e-readers and other portable devices.”
‘Automated Publishing’
eBook Technologies supplies intelligent reading devices and licenses technologies that the company said “enable automated publishing and control over content distribution.” The offerings include an online bookstore, an online “bookshelf,” software that converts content to the format used by the company, and e-reading devices.
The company is headed by President Garth Conboy, an e-book veteran. In the late 1990s, he was vice president of software engineering for SoftBook Press, which developed one of the first dedicated e-book readers, and he owns several related patents.
The acquisition is the latest public move in Google’s positioning in this new and growing market. In December, Google announced Google eBooks, a service for buying and reading digital publications. The service doesn’t require that a user have dedicated hardware, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle, but makes titles available via the cloud for any browser.
Google Books, which has developed a large library of public-domain books, has become part of Google eBooks, for a total of more than three million titles available. Of those, some hundreds of thousands are for sale.
As a device-agnostic service, Google eBooks also offers reading apps for Apple’s iOS and the Android operating system, currently the most popular for tablets and among the top OSes for smartphones. Since the titles are cloud-based, syncing between devices is irrelevant — the cloud remembers you.
Ads on Books?
The cloud is also a big bookshelf, so customers can buy titles from Google or its bookseller partners, such as Alibris or a variety of…