Yesterday marked the launch of Google eBooks in Canada, giving Canadian readers access to hundreds of thousands of titles from publishers like Random House, McClelland & Stewart, Douglas & McIntyre, House of Anansi, Dundurn, and others.
Google’s two million public domain ebooks are included too, or course. Google also partnered with the Campus eBookstore and McNally Robinson, making it possible for readers to download Google eBooks through them as well.
Google’s eBooks come in EPUB and PDF formats, and use Adobe DRM, the most common ebook format. Google eBooks are compatible with just about every dedicated ebook reader except the Kindle, including the Kobo ereaders, Sony Readers, PocketBooks, and many others. Google eBooks are stored in the cloud so they are accessible at anytime for online reading, and you can choose to download the ebooks for offline viewing too.
You don’t even need an ebook reader for Google eBooks because they have apps for Android tablets, Android phones, the iPad, and iPhone. Plus pretty much any web browser that supports Javascript will work with Google’s browser-based web reader. The Kindle can even display Google eBooks with its basic web browser, but the result isn’t very pleasant.
Google opened their ebookstore in the United States last December. And then opened a branch in the UK about one month ago. Google doesn’t have their own dedicated ebook reader. They partnered with iriver to bring Google ebooks to the iriver Story HD, but it is such a basic ebook reader that it doesn’t stand much of a chance.
What publishers does kobo have? Also is there an advantage to using google books instead of kobo? It looked more expensive for the titles I looked at.
I don’t get why anyone would get public domain ebooks from somewhere other than Gutenberg.
Thanks
I imagine Kobo has agreements with a lot more publishers since they’ve been at it a lot longer than Google. As for Project Gutenberg, one reason is they only have 36,000 ebooks. Personally I like Feedbooks for PD titles a lot more than Gutenberg’s because they are formatted nicer and don’t have 15 pages of blah blah blahing at the beginning of every book.