A British company called Interead (which makes an e-book reader, COOL-ER) has tied up with Google and thus becomes the first e-book store outside the US to partner with Google Books. It will now get to showcase over a million out-of-copyright books scanned by Google on its website Coolerbooks.com which can be accessed for free. According to the press release this makes Coolerbooks.com the largest e-book store in the world.
Amazon Inc joins the Google rivals
While things are going good for Google that doesn’t mean its lawyers are going to get any less sleepless nights. Amazon.com Inc is openly encouraging the US Supreme Court to reject the settlement that might take place between Google Inc and Authors Guild. The settlement is the result of a lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild 4 years ago on the count of copyright infringement. As a result, Google has agreed to pay USD 125 Million to create a Books Rights Registry. This is a place where authors and publishers can register their works and receive compensation.
Price fixing?
Amazon.com (along with Google rivals, Microsoft and Yahoo) feel that this will lead to monopoly since Google will get to set the rates. Libraries have also expressed concern over this fact and feel that if Google digitizes a huge number of books (by scanning them), then the price fixing will affect their business to a large extent.
Currently, the US Justice Department is investigating the deal and the EU Antitrust enforcers are also showing a keen interest by studying the deal, based on Germany’s recommendation.
Obviously while it may seem that Amazon really is concerned about what happens to the libraries, it does have its vested interests. The Google Books will cause direct damage to Amazon, who has recently ventured into the e-reader market and receives a significant amount of revenue from its customers buying content.
