This isn't about selling the books they scanned, but a separate project.
This sounds remarkably like when they tried to reach out and do print, video and radio ads. Even though it looked like something that was related to their core offering, it flopped hugely.
They are overreaching.
To get legs under an ebook-selling project, a company has to devote a lot of resources to promotion, the ecosystem, and making users happy.
That's why Amazon's gotten a much higher adoption rate for the Kindle than Sony has for the Reader. Sony was like "Eh, we'll make an ebook reader" and (seemingly) didn't invest much in the service and ecosystem. The device was fine. But the Kindle whoops its ass because you can order books from anywhere in, what is it, 49 states? And people are used to buying all their books from Amazon already.
I don't really see Google doing things that differently from Sony. They have so many projects going on already that seem neglected.
This sounds remarkably like when they tried to reach out and do print, video and radio ads. Even though it looked like something that was related to their core offering, it flopped hugely.
They are overreaching.
To get legs under an ebook-selling project, a company has to devote a lot of resources to promotion, the ecosystem, and making users happy.
That's why Amazon's gotten a much higher adoption rate for the Kindle than Sony has for the Reader. Sony was like "Eh, we'll make an ebook reader" and (seemingly) didn't invest much in the service and ecosystem. The device was fine. But the Kindle whoops its ass because you can order books from anywhere in, what is it, 49 states? And people are used to buying all their books from Amazon already.
I don't really see Google doing things that differently from Sony. They have so many projects going on already that seem neglected.
I think this is a strategy that's going to fail.