Posted by Abraham Murray, Product Manager, Google BooksToday is the first page in a new chapter of our mission to improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we know as books.
Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new
Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale. Find the latest
bestsellers like James Patterson’s
Cross Fire and Jonathon Franzen’s
Freedom, dig into
popular reads like Laura Hillenbrand’s
Unbroken and catch up on the
classics like
Great Expectations,
A Tale of Two Cities and
Gulliver’s Travels.
We designed Google eBooks to be open. Many
devices are compatible with Google eBooks—everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. With the new
Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud. That means you can access your ebooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa—using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage.
In addition to a full-featured web reader, free apps for
Android and
Apple devices will make it possible to shop and read on the go. For many books you can select which font, font size, day/night reading mode and line spacing suits you—and pick up on the page where you left off when switching devices.
You can discover and buy new ebooks from the
Google eBookstore or get them from one of our independent bookseller partners:
Powell’s,
Alibris and participating members of the
American Booksellers Association. You can choose where to buy your ebooks like you choose where to buy your print books, and keep them all on the same bookshelf regardless of where you got them.
When Google Books first launched in 2004, we set out to make the information stored in the world’s books accessible and useful online. Since then, we’ve digitized more than 15 million books from more than 35,000 publishers, more than 40
libraries, and more than 100 countries in more than 400 languages. This deep repository of knowledge and culture will continue to be searchable through
Google Books search in the research section alongside the ebookstore.

Launching Google eBooks is an initial step toward giving you greater access to the vast variety of information and entertainment found in books. Our journey has just begun. We welcome
your feedback as we read on to the next chapter.
(
Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)
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Posted By Inside Google Book Search to
Inside Google Books at 12/06/2010 07:00:00 AM