The announcement of the iPad included Apple’s own proprietary iBookstore, an application through which users can buy, store and read fiction and non-fiction works. Apple struck deals with Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, MacMillan and Hachette publishers to fill the store with their book titles. So is this the only way we’re going to read books on our iPad? Not at all!

Here’s a question for you: which platform has the biggest repository of book content in the world, as of now? Google does. With over ten million titles, Google Books is the leader in digital book content now and no competitor has come close this amount.

Google Books is not an e-book store

Google Books has its qualities. It is integrated into Google’s search engine and when our search query matches one of its millions of books, Google shows us the page. However, Google is not leveraging its book platform as a digital e-book store, as you’d expect. It chooses instead to link to online stores where the physical books are sold.

Google’s tense relationship with publishers is one of the reasons for this; Last year, Google settled a court case with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers about its unlimited scanning of books from libraries without any permission from their authors or publishers. Google defended its usage as fair-use under copyright law but as it is a profitable business, the judge was not really going to recognize Google’s defense and a settlement was the result.

The in-court settlement stated that authors and publishers can opt-out of the Google Books program and have their content removed or instead opt-in which means they receive a lump sum for their book (about $40 to $100), a share of the revenue from advertising displayed next to their books and a share of the revenue from optional selling of their books. There you have it: Google says it would like to start selling books soon through Google Checkout and deliver them to customers as standard PDF files. This would mean you could buy and read these books on any mobile device with PDF support, including the iPad. Expected is that Google will develop a more integrated app for the iPad too, like Apple’s iBookstore.

Apple iBookstore vs. Google Books

Will Apple be able to come close to the amount of titles Google has? Possibly, yes. It has done extremely well with a similar concept: its iTunes store; of which the song catalogue now contains over eleven million tracks and which has sold over 10 billion tracks since its launch. Apple’s strategy of actually striking deals with music industry record labels and book publishers at the moment appears to be more effective than Google’s brute-force strategy of just scanning content and having authors and publishers opt-out later. The settlement will make it possible for Google to start selling books but it does not seem to be rushing to do this as I can’t find any title on the Google Books store which I can buy.

Running Google Books on your iPad

Until Google releases its own Books app for the iPad, you can already use a beta version of the service in which publicly licensed books, such as Sherlock Holmes, are available. Running it is as simple as opening up the browser on your iPad and pointing it to http://books.google.com/m.

Have you been using Google Books on your iPhone, iPad or other mobile device? Does it work well for you? How do you expect Google Books and the Apple iBookstore to develop? Can they co-exist on one device? Are they actually very different from each other? Tell me in the comments!

In less than ten years, physical music stores were almost completely replaced by online music sharing services and download stores like iTunes and AmazonMP3. With the advent of e-ink and e-book readers such as the Kindle, the same transition to the online realm has started to take place for books. And today we’re at the brink of the next transition of content to move into the digital realm; yes, we’re talking about print magazines.

Condé Nast, publisher of magazines including Vogue, Wired and Glamour has announced it will begin making some of its magazines available for the Apple iPad, beginning this April. The first titles to be published will be the April edition of GQ followed by Vanity Fair for June and The New Yorker and Glamour following soon after. GQ has been already available on the iPhone as an app previously. WIRED will be hitting the iPad in June.

WIRED leading the way

Condé Nast is one of the first to adopt the iPad as a magazine publishing platform. Its technology imprint WIRED has been leading the way with an enthusiastic reception of the iPad in its editorials and a very refreshing opinion in how it can change the way magazines are published. Its editor-in-chief Chris Anderson called it a ‘game changer’ in magazine publishing. A few weeks ago, WIRED already presented a demonstration version of its magazine, made in Adobe Flash, and shown on a supersized screen symbolizing the iPad. This demonstration showed the digital magazines can include special dynamic content previously deemed impossible in print. Video advertisements and moving pictures were some of the dynamic features.

The iPad runs are part of a test which will run until October of this year at least, according to an internal memo. However, if they deem successful they will most certainly continue.

Laggards and pioneers

Like with all transitions, there are pioneers and laggards. Condé Nast is very smart in embracing this technology instead of fighting it; with this stand, it can most certainly become a pioneer in digital publishing. It can lay the groundwork for how future publishers will make their magazine content available on devices like the iPad.  Most other publishers are laggards and are not nearly as far as Condé Nast in how it prioritizes its tablet strategy and already experiments with it. I mean, it is only about a month after we were actually confirmed an iPad was coming and they are already jumping on it like this. Their pioneering strategy demands respect. Publishers of the world: keep a close eye on what is happening here.

How do you see the landscape of print magazines change by the introduction of the iPad? Will print magazines die out completely and be replaced by digital more dynamic versions? Or will things not take off as much as we think and will the magazine fail on a digital device? I’d like to know what you think. Tell me in the comments!