Sony/Google Eye Amazon from Far End of Long Tail

Following on yesterday’s report about how the future of news will be via apps on mobile devices, today it’s time to revisit the growing competition over eBook platforms.

Sony ratcheted up the pressure on Amazon and its Kindle device  by announcing this week a partnership with Google that will bring a half million of the books digitized by the search giant to its Sony Reader.

Amazon currently has around a quarter million books available via the Kindle. These are primarily new books, best-sellers — the front end of what Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson established as “The Long Tail” of the global book market.

Google, by contrast, is approaching the digitization of books from the far, back end of the tail. Over the past four-plus years, Google has scanned over seven million titles from university and research libraries, like those at the University of Michigan.

Under the Sony-Google deal, the volumes being made available to users of the Reader were published before 1923, and their copyrights have expired, leaving them free in the public domain. But in order to push its far larger inventory of seven million books onto eBook platforms, Google has to get a judge’s approval of its recent settlement offer in a class-action suit brought on behalf of authors (including yours truly), publishers, and other copyright-holders.

My bets are that Google will eventually prevail, bringing one big fat tail indeed into the world of eBooks.  As the devices like Kindle and Reader improve, and the revenue-sharing gets worked out among the various stakeholders, the transition from paper to digital will hit the book business in earnest.