"We've really hit a tipping point," Coker says. "Once people try an e-book, it's a 'wow' experience."
And starting in 2010 anybody who wants to read an e-book will have to choose more than just which reader they buy. Increasingly, consumers will have an array of e-book access choices, such as buying perpetual access to a book stored on the Internet, downloading a book to a personal device or perhaps some other model. New reader devices are also due to hit the market from Mountain View-based Plastic Logic, Fremont-based Spring Design, and perhaps Apple, which is widely expected to release a tablet reader in 2010.
And Google plans to offer an online retail service for e-books that will allow readers to buy access, in perpetuity, to any e-book stored on Google's network. "Our vision is basically to provide a great consumer model for buying digital books, using the browser in a sort of device-agnostic way," said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker. "It could be on a Web-enabled laptop, a desktop or a phone, a tablet — any of those things. Our vision of it is to provide an open platform for reading and accessing books." The retail service, to be called Google Editions, will be only for newly published books and is separate from the Internet giant's highly controversial plan to scan existing out-of-print books, splitting the proceeds with any rights-holders it can locate. Google won't say how much a newly published e-book will cost on Editions, but it has tried to steer speculation away from talk of the service being an "Amazon-killer" that uses Google's dominant search engine to siphon book-buying traffic from the e-retailer. And finally - The Kindle's format does not support downloads of e-books in the format used by many public libraries, although Amazon counters that thousands of public-domain books are available in the Kindle store, including many free classics. Customers can use sites such as Gutenberg.org, Google and Internet Archive to access other e-books.
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