Google Me This, Google Me That

In the ongoing battle for the Future of Publishing, it seems there's another player vying for the crown of Evil Book Overlord™: Google. Yes, yes, I know we've been hearing about them for years with regard to copyright infringement, but now that it seems like the G-Unit has made deals with several (read: 25,000+) publishers and authors to sell their works via Google Editions, I think Amazon and Apple have good reason to be worried.

Between books it will legally sell through publisher/author contracts and books with expired copyrights, Google Editions will have nearly four million e-book titles available (compared to the iBookstore's 46,000 or so and Amazon's 500,000). If you tried to read one Google Editions book per day (assuming they didn't add more over time), it would take you almost eleven thousand years to read them all. To which I say: that is pretty awesome.

Some interesting caveats, however: apparently, your Google books will live in the cloud, which is a fancy way of saying "on the Internet." They won't live on your computer and you'll either need to be connected to the Internet or download the books into an off-line cache to read them. No word yet on which device formats the books will be available in, but I'm guessing that since Google is competing with Amazon, their proprietary e-book format won't be one of them.

Questions/comments/vitriol/praise: you know what to do.