ebook wars : Amazon vs Apple vs Google

Amazon has launched its UK Kindle Store with over 400,000 books for download. The price an ebook is between one third and one half less than a physical copy. This price cutting is to compete with Apples iPad.
The store also contains newspapers that are automatically downloaded to your kindle daily, magazine subscriptions that arrive the morning they go on sale in shops and blog / news RSS feeds.

The company is actively trying to pick up customers who aren’t able to afford an iPad. Amazon has slashed the price of its e-reader and last week unveiled two advanced versions designed to be lighter, faster, cheaper and more mass market.

The latest Kindle is not available until the September but eager readers can download the Kindle app and read start their books ahead of time. The app is available on PC, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android and Mac systems.

Although Amazon has not conclusively reviled sales figures for its kindle, it is consistently in their top 100 electronic items in terms of sales.

Digital books account for 6 per cent of consumer sales in the US according to Amazon.

The virtual store stocks over 80 of the 100 Nielsen UK Bestsellers in addition to authors including Stieg Larsson, Dan Brown, Terry Pratchett, Ian Rankin, Sophie Kinsella, Stephenie Meyer and Ken Follett.
In the current economy targeting the bookworm who just wants to read their books is a great move by Amazon. Only time will tell if it will pay off as Apple is set to open its largest store in Covent Garden tomorrow, which is expected to boost the sales of its iPhone and iPad.

The main companies to benefit from this move will be the magazine / newspaper industry. It will offer another way for them to sell their publications cheaply to a wider audience. Quicker delivery on subscriptions will help magazines catch up with the real-time nature of news online, but still fall short.

Amazon may also be trying to get a first mover advantage over Google Editions, an upcoming ebook store from Google. Google Editions is set to launch late-summer 2010 and will allow users to read books online or download them to a cache for offline reading. Google Editions will have the advantage that all content will be viewable on any internet-enabled device; the product has been given the motto “buy anywhere, read anywhere”. The product will replace Google Books.