I feel a great disturbance in the ebook market...

So Google's gone and done it, they've entered the bookselling market.  Up til now, you could use Google Books to read some scans of out of print stuff, and do some great searches on it.  But today they launched their much anticipated (well, by Google at least, if not anyone else in particular) bookstore.  Of course, need I remind you this is the company that seems to have conflated the concepts of out of print with public domain?  The one that pissed off a lot of authors by trying to assert the right to scan in and provide copyrighted works as if they were free to use?  Yeah, them.  So amidst all the ooohing an aaaahing about how nice it is that Google is now in this market space, I think perhaps folks should keep the Google Book Settlement in mind.

In any case, yes, the big G is now a book retailer.  Or etailer.  Or whatever buzzword of the day is.  It means you can purchase books through a site that will help you search for the books you might want to buy.  Yeah, even I can see how that'd be quite useful from their perspective.  I don't know the fancy marketing terms enough to be sure, but I think that might fit what I've heard called Pull marketing.  Okay, enough making it sound like I'm villifying Google, because I'm not.  I'm mostly pretty neutral on that front.

It's curious to say the least that they aren't supporting out of the gate the Mobi/PRC file format that would allow Kindle users to read these books.   Anyone out there really believe that a major computer programming company that can turn the entire world on its ear and take over an already crowded marketspace to the point that they are THE dominant force in search engines think that they just couldn't manage to handle a file format?  Yeah, me neither.  So okay, looks like the big G is taking on the big A.  Well, that seems natural to me.  For all that iPAD may be dominating in device sales, Kindle still seems to be where the books themselves are selling.  Frankly, I don't believe that Apple has dislodged Kindle nearly so much as a lot of so called data seems to be working around the net suggests.  I think people are much more likely buying iPADs to play Angry Birds than they are to buy it as an ereader.  I wouldn't be surprised if more people use the B&N app to read books than use the native iBookstore.  Same for Kindle.  And as Google hasn't (yet) announced any device they intend to produce (why bother, let the manufacturers use Android underneath and pull in a license fee) the way to take on Amazon seems to be in the format wars.  Throw in on the side of ePUB, and you get all the competitors to Amazon on your side.  (Until they all realize that if you can buy your book from Google and read it on your Nook, why bother with B&N or any other source???) 

So we're back to format wars.   Yay fun.  I still don't know how this is going to pan out.  With so many against them, it seems hard to believe that Amazon won't cave and begin to support ePUB.  I mean, how hard can that really be?  They were able to add in PDF in response to consumer demand, can we really believe ePUB would be out of the question?  I doubt it.  But I don't know if that's going to be on the horizon any time soon.  So who will win this staring contest?  Amazon? Google?  Neither?

Oy.  I hate the waiting game.  But what other choice do we have?

So what do you think, is Google entering the ebook market a good thing or a bad thing, and why?