In the year since Judge Denny Chin invalidated Google's agreement with the Authors' Guild to display and sell digital editions of orphaned works, the towering monolith of search has been a sleeping giant in e-books. Still, every so often it tosses and turns, crushing villages and villagers caught in its slumbering shadow.
On Thursday, Google announced that it would sunset its retailer partner program for e-books by the end of January 2013. Google's announcement followed the release of a letter from the American Booksellers Association to its members informing them that their partnership with Google would end at the end of the year. ABA CEO Oren Teicher also added that the association was already engaged in talks with other partners to give independent bookstores a way to continue to sell e-books on a major platform.
In his blog post, Google's Scott Dougall writes that the retail reseller program "has not gained the traction that we hoped it would" and that "looking at the results to-date, it's clear that the reseller program has not met the needs of many readers or booksellers." Like Google Books itself, wholesaling e-books to bookstores just hasn't been able to capture mindshare.
From one point of view, this is a serious setback to small bookstores looking to maintain parity where book readership is increasingly digital (just check out this brand-new Pew Internet report) with competitors like Barnes & Noble and Amazon who can offer both print and digital books on their own platforms. One of Google's virtues as far as booksellers were concerned was that it had no real stake one way or the other in sales of print books. The indie stores can replace Google, but probably not without climbing into bed with one of these print + digital superstores or teaming up with a much smaller e-book wholesaler, unless Apple swoops in to save the day.
Then again, users of Google Reader's social features, Maps' and Translate's APIs, Gears, Wave, Labs, Android App Builder, and a dozen other programs Google's shuttered in the Larry Page era in order to put "more wood behind fewer arrows" (like enhanced reality glasses) will be shocked! SHOCKED! to hear that an unloved and relatively unprofitable program on which a small number of users had staked a lot is being killed in order to focus on a new e-book storefront that still has a chance of achieving "Google scale."
In other words, congratulations, bookstores! You just got Googlighted.
Photo: Google Play ebooks, image courtesy Google
