Paid Content reported yesterday on Google´s E-books store. Google Editions will be device agnostic. Basically, this means that you can read the titles on any device with a browser. They report that users will also be able to access the texts they have purchased when they’re not connected to the Internet via a cached version. This sounds like Google Editions will be a service using modern browser technology and Google Gears, and differ from the vertical structure of both Amazon´s Kindle and Apple iTunes.
It comes as no surprise that this in line with a recent post on Google Mobile Blog. The Google mobile team were asked which phones were their most favored. The answer: “Every Phone”. On the question web vs app they answered:
“At Google, we believe in the power of the web to give us the flexibility to build one app that can run in the browser on multiple phones, rather than developing a different app for every platform. With more capable mobile browsers and technologies like HTML5 and Gears, web apps deliver a great experience because they closely mirror the desktop web in overall look, feel and functionality. They also let us iterate fast and add lots of cool features quickly without having to build from scratch each feature for various devices and platforms. Of course in some cases, investing in native applications for multiple platforms make sense. [...] “
Microsoft´s fears from the late 1990s have become reality. Back then they feared Netscape browser with Sun Java to substitute Windows (see Finding of Facts from the US antitrust case, for example sections 397 and 398).
