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"Google's forthcoming digital bookstore, Google Editions, will launch in June or July of this year, Google's Manager for Strategic Partner Development Chris Palma told The Wall Street Journal. The service will sell e-books on the web just like Amazon's Kindle store or Apple's iBooks.\nEditions was originally slated for release in the first half of 2010 but that didn't pan out, apparently.\nAs many as 500,000 books could be included, pulled from the partners with whom Google already made deals for its Google Books search engine (previously called \"Google Print\" and \"Google Book Search\"). The books can be downloaded via web browser and will presumably not be tied to any particular device or platform.\nWhile Google Editions books might be readable on Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle e-readers (the Sony Reader devices are a shoe-in since Google's existing book library is one of their major selling points already), the store will compete with the iBooks and Kindle stores. That competition could be good for consumers but frustrating for Apple and Amazon.\nGoogle Faces Legal Hurdles\nGoogle has faced perpetual lawsuits from authors, photographers, publishers and companies associated with online bookstores since it unveiled Google Books in 2004. Google's goal was to archive books to \"preserve human knowledge\" but the holders of the copyrights wanted compensation.\nA deal was reached that allows copyright holders to control how their material is presented on Google Books and set up a system where Books-related ad revenues and sales are handed out to copyright holders through an independent registry. That wasn't the end of the story, though; Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and library associations were later organized into a coalition by the Internet Archive to challenge Google Books on antitrust and privacy grounds.\nThe U.S. Congress has become involved in that legal battle that has yet to be resolved. More recently, photographers' organizations banded together to challenge Google for hosting books with copyrighted photos in them, too. We don't have enough details about Google Editions yet to know exactly how those contests will affect it, but they're cause for concern.\n\n\nFor more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/05/04/google-editions/>