I really hate such biz-puff news stories that are long on buzzwords, regurgitated PR-speak and hype, and short on everything else. While the real "newsdiff content" in this particular case seems to have been more than worthy of attention: unlike other e-book vendors that are more or less targeted at specific hardware and/or software e-book-readers, Google's e-books will be readable in any browser on any web-capable screen/ device. Google, which (according to offhand reports) has already scanned upwards of 12M [presumably out-of-copyright or uncontested] books, plans to make them available as part of the plan. THAT'S THE UPSIDE.
The downside is that the e-books will be online read-only, no downloading/ offline reading will be possible. It is not known, whether that restriction will apply to HTML5 or other offline-memory/ cache capabilities. |