As if eBooks weren’t changing enough of the publishing world, Google is poised to smash the current (and fledgling) ebook publishing and distribution model to pieces.

While information is sketchy, and liable to change, Google has been building towards a position as an ultimate ebook marketplace that will very likely oust Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and any other retailer.

The Current Landscape: Distributing eBooks

Currently, if you want to buy an ebook, you can do one of the following:

1) Buy it from your hardware manufacturer (iBookstore, Amazon, and B&N for the respective devices – iPad, iPod, Kindle, and Nook)

2) Buy from the publisher’s website if they offer downloads of their files. Currently this necessitates authors/publishers to maintain 3 types of files for the leading formats: PDF, ePub, and mobi/prc. The Kindle is the hold out for mobi, as other ebook readers coming to the market are using ePub. The PDF format, at this time, is to varied and loose in its standards and current hardware is too narrow for it to be a contender on anything but PCs and tablets.

3) Get it from public domain source websites (largely limited to books published before 1923, so no current bestsellers there).

The Current Landscape: Publishing eBooks

As a publisher or author, to bring your book to the new marketplace(s), you must do the following:

1) Create an ePub and mobi/prc edition of your book, and optionally a PDF. You can do this yourself, or pay someone to convert it. If you don’t have a digital file of your ebook, or the digital file is in PDF, Quark, or InDesign, conversion can be very tedious since the ebook formats are very simple html/xml text files. If you are not familiar with designing web pages with a text editor like Notepad, you’d better hire someone to do the conversion.

You could use a service like Smashwords, who will convert your book for free with an imperfect automated process (called the “Meat Grinder” – do they think your creative work is an animal carcass to be made into sausage?), but then take an additional 15% of every sale.

2) Submit your book to each seller separately: B&N (via soon to be opened PubIT!) Amazon, the iBookstore, and Sony’s ereader store. Sony and Apple will require you provide a new ISBN just for the digital edition of your book. Smashwords and some other aggregators will do this for you, for their back-end fee.

3) Refer customers to at least 3 sources where they can buy your books. By the way, if you don’t sell a minimum number via Apple’s ibookstore, you won’t see a check; Apple just keeps 100% of what people paid for your work.

How Google Editions Will Change Everything

Since only some information is known, let’s start with the facts:

Google is in possession of 9-12 million books scanned from libraries. Not all of these are available on Google Books (yet).

Google has been approaching publishers of those books (like myself) asking us to sign agreements to sell the books they have digital copies of. So even if you haven’t digitized your books, Google already did that for you.

Some time ago Google acquired reCaptcha. This is an important, but not universally known piece of information: reCaptcha, in addition to protecting websites from spam bots, is a method of having humans digitize scanned books into clean text format – to the tune of 150,000 labor hours of work each day, proofing some 200 million words daily.

Google has said that their ebooks will work on all ereader and portable devices, as well as PCs.

Google’s eBooks will be DRM free, unlike, well, all the major players thus far.

Every ereader coming to market in the near future, and just about every tablet, other than Apple’s products, will be running Google’s Android OS. At least on the tablets, these devices have access to Alkido, the Android ereader app that will likely be integrated with Google Editions.

Knowing this, Google will be able to approach publishers and offer:

1) Free conversion of books (if they were not already scanned and digitized)

2) A central marketplace for selling books to all devices and platforms

If necessary, Google could even offer these books in a totally new eBook format that could be read by the different devices and still command the marketplace. Google need not join the squabble of lesser companies fighting the hardware or format wars, when it has already invested itself in securing a prominent position in the marketplace – even before its service is launched.

The Microcapitalist Perspective

So long as Google remains in a marketplace position, that is, as a facilitator for individual producers to bring their goods to the public, and does not obliterate the option of others to sell ebooks through other channels, this is a good microcaptialist model.

The easier it is for a producer, in this case a content creator, to bring their products to the marketplace, the more effective their sales efforts can be and a greater share of their time can be spent on producing rather than administrative and marketing activities.

However, if Google begins to restrict products due to content, somehow arranges for exclusive distribution rights or blocks others’ attempts to create specialized markets, then they will have betrayed their own slogan and decency by “being evil.”

UPDATE: For more information on the microcapitalist view of merchants vs marketplaces, see this article.