Amazon and Google - different approaches
By Paul Biba
In an interesting posting on The Millions, C. Max Magee looks at a comparison I hadn’t thought about.
Interestingly, while a watershed event in the evolutions of ebooks has likely occurred this month, the Kindle 2 unveiling is only one of the nominees for that honor. Also in the running is Google’s “1.5 Million Books in Your Pocket” announcement last week. For those who missed it, Google has engineered a mobile version of Google Books, for use on iPhones and phones running Google’s own mobile operating system. Right now it lets people access the public domain books that Google has scanned and automatically converts the scanned pages into standardized fonts for ease of reading on mobile devices. …
Even as ebook evolution follows both paths, the expanding capabilities of the devices will open up huge opportunities for newspapers and magazines to blend print and electronic publishing, and who knows what new media business models may blossom out of this new hybrid medium.
Check out the full article.
February 21st, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Funny, I assumed the difference was that Google is predominately mastered from paper sources while Amazon is mastered from publisher’s files. Among the implications being that Amazon could turn off its servers (or selectively delete) tomorrow while Google cannot.