Google Ebookstore Offers Librarians Limited Use
RSSBy Lauren Barack
With this week's launch of Google's online bookstore, school and public libraries now have another way patrons can view children's ebooks—but it's not without some serious limitations. While the software offers an online catalog that lets users read across multiple devices such as an iPad, Nook, or any computer with Internet connection, it's really geared toward individuals. Since a Google ebook can't reside on multiple devices simultaneously, media specialists will have limited use for the software, especially since they often use multiple ereaders for class reading assignments, particularly Kindles, where one download can be read on as many as six devices at once depending on the title. With almost three million titles available, many of them free, Google is marching into a fairly crowded digital book space. Google ebooks lets users find, buy, and read individual titles on many devices. "You can open a single Google ebook on your PC at home, then hop on the train to work, and read the same ebook on your smart phone (e.g., Droid X) or tablet (e.g., iPad) and then pick up where you left off on your laptop in the library—without ever downloading the book," Hornung explains. "If you want to read the book on a "dedicated e-reader" that doesn't have a capable Web browser, then you can download a DRM-enabled copy of that book." A purchased Google ebook can also be stored in the cloud and read it from any Web browser, similar to just logging in to read email. "Or you can read it on your Android or Apple device with the Google Books app. Or you can use Adobe Digital Editions to transfer it from your computer to an open format device like the Nook," she adds. For now though, titles for K-12 students abound from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins, 2008) to Rebecca Stead's Newbery-award winning When You Reach Me (Random, 2009)—which clocks in at a competitive $8.63, the same price as the Kindle version—as well as other popular reads, including the Magic Tree House's Vacation Under the Volcano (Random, 1998). "All that said—there are nearly three million Google ebooks available for free, which you can download onto a computer from the Google ebookstore and then side-load them with a USB cable onto your e-reader," says Hornung. "And you can read them on as many devices as you like. I would assume school librarians would want to hand-curate those books to make sure they were age-appropriate."
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"The main point here is that we do not have an institutional offering," says Jeannie Hornung, a Google spokesperson by email. "Google ebooks are for personal use only."
