The new Google eBookstore, a rival to the Kindle Store, didn’t disappoint me when I tried it just now. Books display on PCs, Macs, iPads, nooks and other gadgets (although not the Kindle), even offline—and you can adjust the type size and style, line spacing, and other variables. More info here. Also see Google Blog.
Ahead is a screenshot from Scandals, published by Twilight Times Books. The first few chapters are free, and the Google price for the rest is $4.58, a fraction of the trade paperback’s cost.
Disclosure: I’m a very small Google shareholder, although I’ve been a loud critic of the proposed Google Book Settlement.
Update, 7:22 p.m.: I agree with wishes for shared annotations and other wrinkles, including a dictionary, but suspect they’re on the way.
Update, December 8: Good critique from the Washington Post’s Rob Pogorario, who among other things notes how big publishers hobbled the eBookStore with restrictive DRM. I remain upbeat despite the eBookstore’s very real flaws, including—as best I can determine—the current absence of a complete free copy of New Grub Street, George Gissing’s best novel. I see only a Volume II. Psst! You can get the complete work for free at Feedbooks. After more than a century, this is still the book about literary politics.
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I am a big fan of this blog and a big fan of the book that gave rise to this blog. I have read it in paperback, and I loved it. I read it over a period of several days, underlining sentences, circling words, marking off whole paragraphs, writing notes in the margins, going back to a chapter I wanted to check, looking at the cover again, reading the back cover copy again, in other words, totally READING this book the way it was meant to be read, which is ON PAPER. Sorry, but reading a book like this wonderful novel on a screen SUCKS BIGTIME and IS NOT READING. Readers of the whole, go back to paper. Ebooks suck! I mean it.
Thanks for the nice words about Scandals and the blog, Dan–and yes, I, too, love paper books and especially the independent bookstores that sell them. But not everyone lives near a bookstore carrying Scandals, including most folks outside the States. What’s more, some may live in small apartments without room for zillions of paper books, and others may have to downhold expenditures because of the Great Recession. One positive about the Google arrangement is that the company is working with small bookstores. Meanwhile I have asked Twilight Times Books to consider selling the paper edition with the E version without charging extra–so people can enjoy Scandals as conveniently as possible. I’d love to see small bookstores able to offer Scandals this way!
David