Google’s e-book store links to independents
SAN FRANCISCO – Struggling neighborhood book stores now have a new way to ring up sales, courtesy of a formidable new rival – Google. But it still may not be enough to help them keep their doors open.
The Internet search leader opened its long-awaited electronic book store Monday, competing against Amazon.com Inc. and further accelerating the shift of book distribution from brick-and-mortar stores to the Web.
It’s the latest twist in a tumultuous new chapter for the book industry, one that will challenge traditional book retailers’ ability to adapt and avoid the fate of music and video retailers that have been beaten by digital competition in the past five years.
Unlike Amazon or Apple Inc., Google Inc.’s entry is giving independent retailers a way to keep up with the times.
Google is allowing merchants to sell its inventory of 3 million electronic books through their own sites and bring in more money as they scramble to adjust to the rising popularity of e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and computer tablets such as Apple’s iPad.
“This will help give independent book stores a more level playing field,” predicted Michael Tucker, who owns four small book stores in the San Francisco area and is president of the American Booksellers Association, a trade group.
Google’s electronic book store, in the works for more than a year, draws upon a portion of the 15 million printed books that the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has scanned into its computers since 2004.
About 4,000 publishers, including CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster Inc., Random House Inc. and Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group, are also allowing Google to carry many of their recently released books in the new store.
Millions more out-of-print titles will appear in Google’s store, called eBooks, if the company can gain federal court approval of a proposed $125 million class-action settlement with U.S. publishers and authors.
The publishers and authors had sued Google, saying it scanned copyrighted books without getting permission.
Google’s e-books will work on the Nook, Sony Corp.’s Reader devices and practically every other e-reading device except the Kindle. Google plans to offer sharp discounts on many of its e-books but it will still pay publishers 52 percent of the list price for sales made on its site, unless another arrangement has been negotiated with an outside agency.
The revenue-sharing formula changes slightly when the electronic sales occur through one of the independent book merchants or other partners Google hopes to recruit. Google didn’t disclose the precise split of these arrangements.