When it comes to the latest and greatest in new media, Canadians are used to waiting. So when a well-known web service finally and belatedly comes North—as Google’s ebookstore did yesterday—we tend to get a bit excited that we too have been included in the future.
On first glance, there’s much to be pleased about with Google Books, their electronic store for the book lovers. It boasts a selection of “hundreds of thousands” of books at various price points, with an additional 2 million free, public domain books. It should be noted, however, that the latter group tends to be of scattershot quality and organization.
According to Google, all the major Canadian publishers are on board, and agreements are in place with The Globe and Mail and literary magazine Quill and Quire for bestseller lists and recommendations. All in all, Google’s offering sounds quite promising. But how will the arrival of the massive American company affect the Canadian book business?
According to Nic Boshart, Manager of Technology for eBOUND Canada, the Canadian publishing industry has seen this coming and is ready.
“Another new player is good for the market and readers,” says Boshart. “It’s good for publishers, too. If there are more ways for people to get the content they want, it gives publishers more leverage.”
But with Amazon, Kobo and Apple already established Boshart says he isn’t sure how much of a bang Google can make. Unlike Kobo and Kindle, Google has no one specific device that people can see when they visit a Chapters or when they’re on the subway.
Instead, Google’s offering works on almost any modern device, whether eReader, phone or tablet, regardless of platform, and your books and position all sync across different machines through the cloud. The same is true for Kobo, Kindle and iBooks, too, but Boshart believes Google may have an edge here.
“Google has become synonymous with cloud computing through things like Google Docs,” he says “They can use that as a marketing tool, and if they play it right, they could succeed by focusing on that.”
A problem for all major ebook companies in Canada, however, is the country’s regionality, and according to Boshart, no electronic retailer has built the necessary relationships to really crack the problem.
“People in small communities are going to use an ebookstore because there aren’t any bookstores around,” he says. “But in Canada, you need the long tail of small, local publishers because there’s just so much regional variety.” While book buyers across the country will purchase blockbusters, someone in BC may want something from a local press that is quite different from another person’s wants in Newfoundland.
So ultimately, Google’s main hurdle in Canada will be mindshare. Helping matters somewhat may be the integration of Google Books into Campus eBookstore, a service which lets students at 18 Canadian universities buy textbooks and other texts electronically. But with its competitors already firmly entrenched in many readers’ lives, without a major marketing push Google risks becoming an also-ran in an increasingly crowded market.
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Navneet Alang is Toronto Standard's Tech Critic.
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