Google's E-Book Business Allows Publishers To Set Pricing

Google has announced it's plans to enter the e-book business this year, during an event Google held with publishers at the BookExpo in New York. Under, Google E-Books, publishers will have much more control than the offerings by Amazon. One of the biggest changes would be that Google EBooks would allow publishers to set their own pricing, unlike Amazon's service.

Under Google's rules publishers can set their own prices and could possibly be allowed to charge as much as they do for hardcover books but Google would still have the leverage to lower "exorbitant" pricing if they get out of hand.

It's still unknown at this time how Google plans to deploy e-books to consumers. It would seem as though keeping the books in the cloud and accessing them via the browser would probably seem the most logical way. Consumers would still have access to the books offline by using Google Gears or some other offline caching mechanism.

Google announced in February of its application that brings 1.5 million ebooks to the Apple iPhone and Android phones. The mobile application brings all of the books from books.google.com to the mobile phones. So in a small way, Google is always familiar with delivering content to mobile devices - I'm sure we'll see a mobile app for the new Google E-Books that come out later this year.