A lot has been said and written about ebooks, ebook readers and the stimulus that the publishing industry has been giving to anything and everything digital. The arrival of a technology behemoth such as Google just goes to validate that the market is in fact, worth it.

What about Google?

For starters, Google stunned the publishing industry, with the launch of Google Editions at the recently concluded Frankfurt Book Fair. The company is launching an online service for booksellers and will let readers buy books and read them on a range of devices – from computers to cell phones.

Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search’s publisher partnership program, said the price per book would be set by their publishers and would start with between 400,000 to 600,000 books in the first half of 2010.

Google has already had a tussle with the industry after the much publicized copyright infringement lawsuits involving its book search functionality. While Google sought to index books and offer snippets in its search results, publishers maintain that such a peek into their content is an infringement of copyrights. The case still continues  with the possibility of a settlement in the works.

Who will Google compete with?

Any and every online bookstore – and Google will see Amazon as their closest competitor.

Can Google pull it off?

At first, it didn’t strike me, but going over their recently launched products (Google Editions and Google Wave) and even the existing ones, Google has a platform that:

• Allows users to network (Orkut)
• Allows users to communicate over traditional email (Gmail)
• Allows access to audio/video content (YouTube)
• Allows users to search and preview (Google Search and Preview)
• Allows collaboration (Wave)
• Allows users to buy (Editions)

Google has pretty much what Amazon offers through its website. And once Google has its book offerings in place, I guess music and video would be the next likely additions to the portfolio.

So what does this mean for the publishing industry?

Well, things look to change, and fast. A few things I can think of:

• Proprietary formats of ebooks will not be feasible, considering Google will allow cross format support.
• ebook readers such as the Kindle that are proprietary will lose steam. All ebook readers will then look to incorporate support for as many formats as possible.
• ebook production has become commoditized and soon products will allow users to generate their own ebooks.
• Prices will drop, as competition increases
• ebooks will be part and parcel of every publishing venture
• Growth will come by making rich media ebooks, with  video and audio and of course, the ability to collaborate.

What does this mean for service providers?

Service providers have joined the ebook bandwagon by pro-actively offering ebook production. However, the competition for such an offering is so strong that the market has already matured. Many companies that operate in the peripheral regions of IT and knowledge-driven services have found technology as an entry point into the publishing outsourcing space. The implications of this are:

• Publishers’ craze for anything digital will come full circle. Publishers will need to answer the question – why will people pay us for this?  The process of defining a value proposition through content will then ensue. Technology will always answer the question – how can we get this distributed? Going forward, content will once again emerge as a strength.
• Technology is a great entry point into the publishing outsourcing space, and a lot of peripheral IT and ITES companies have started building on that. Companies that fit this profile will find publishing (especially digital publishing) a market they can easily adapt to.
• I have seen this in a lot of discussions; ebook production is undergoing a price war. While this will definitely suit buyers, sellers will be pressurized into a lowering prices by:
  • Competition and
  • Volume

At a broader level, the digital transition is underway, garnering momentum as each day passes. A post by Patrick Stahler about the newspaper industry  sums that going digital is not just about adding a few rating buttons, comments and a page on a website. It’s more to do with identifying value proposition and then establishing that value amongst the readers.

Sure, ebooks are generating enough sales for publishers to enter the market. But ebooks will not solve all the problems that the industry is facing…