![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Google ebooks
Someone has to say something about it specifically, right? Google ebooks went live yesterday.
Google's ebook store has gone live. It has an app you can use to read its books on a desktop/laptop, and apps for many mobile devices. It works with Adobe's Digital Editions DRM. Some of the books are read-online only; some are downloadable as PDF/epub. Some of the epubs are just raw OCR (optical character recognition) of the scanned PDFs, which means they're loaded with typos (if that's the word... OCRos?) and the formatting is atrocious.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pir8fancier posted a link (and most of the text) to an article at salon.com: Is Google leading an e-book revolution? (My answer? Hell no. When you enter a marketplace 10+ years after it's been established, you are not "leading" anything. Google may add new twists to the commercial ebook game, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with, but when an elephant joins the dog-and-pony show, that's not "leading a revolution." Not even if it's a second elephant.)
Still, they'll bring ebooks to people who hadn't tried them before, because they're readable RIGHT THERE IN YOUR BROWSER, no special downloads required. And most of those people will scratch their heads and wonder what all the fuss is about, because book pages displayed in a browser aren't actually much fun to read. Oh, and non-US people? Pretty much screwed. Googlebooks are very limited for them.
I'm not unhappy with the store, but I'm not bouncing with glee, either. I am *sharply* interested in the results of the lawsuit, which are still pending. (I suspect that nothing available in the store is covered by the contentious parts of the lawsuit.)
Google's ebook store has gone live. It has an app you can use to read its books on a desktop/laptop, and apps for many mobile devices. It works with Adobe's Digital Editions DRM. Some of the books are read-online only; some are downloadable as PDF/epub. Some of the epubs are just raw OCR (optical character recognition) of the scanned PDFs, which means they're loaded with typos (if that's the word... OCRos?) and the formatting is atrocious.
pir8fancier posted a link (and most of the text) to an article at salon.com: Is Google leading an e-book revolution? (My answer? Hell no. When you enter a marketplace 10+ years after it's been established, you are not "leading" anything. Google may add new twists to the commercial ebook game, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with, but when an elephant joins the dog-and-pony show, that's not "leading a revolution." Not even if it's a second elephant.)Still, they'll bring ebooks to people who hadn't tried them before, because they're readable RIGHT THERE IN YOUR BROWSER, no special downloads required. And most of those people will scratch their heads and wonder what all the fuss is about, because book pages displayed in a browser aren't actually much fun to read. Oh, and non-US people? Pretty much screwed. Googlebooks are very limited for them.
I'm not unhappy with the store, but I'm not bouncing with glee, either. I am *sharply* interested in the results of the lawsuit, which are still pending. (I suspect that nothing available in the store is covered by the contentious parts of the lawsuit.)
no subject
A current list of those indie bookstores is here, and you have to approach via the individual store's site to find your ebook, a process that, as yet, has not been explicitly spelled out, but it's more than the other big e-box stores (amazon, sony, etc.) have done. And I know it's really limited for anyone outside the US. That part did surprise me ... but I'm cautiously optimistic about Google Books.
no subject