Google Phone May Morph Into Kindle-Killer

As Medialoper hints in its analysis of the recent Google Book Search agreement with publishers and authors, Google's Android mobile phone OS might become a Kindle-killer.

Android is more than a phone operating system, it's an OS for mobile devices. With Google soon to have exclusive access to its long tail of over 7 million scanned books, Google will have a strong incentive to monetize that content. The book search agreement includes several ways for Google to profit:

1. academia will pay for unlimited access to all the content in all of the scanned books
2. consumers can pay to see or print an entire book
3. once Google integrates the book search program more fully into its current web search program, Google will apply its usual search advertising model

Google won't create a Kindle-like device; the company has stated that it's into software and not hardware. For example, Google's approach to locking up the mobile search business has been to write software that runs mobile phones. Google is likely to apply this approach to ebooks. It will extend Android's capability to include presenting ebooks in a readable fashion. Since these mobile devices already have 3G broadband access baked in, Android phones will become small, backlit versions of the Kindle. Google, yet again, enables the creation of products that generate demand for its services.

Since Android phones will continue to add usefulness beyond mere mobile voice calls (including zero-charge access to the entire web and all its blogs and newspapers), who will want to pay $300 something to own a separate device that charges for some of that functionality? Only those who care about readability. The Kindle is remarkably readable. Still, what's to stop a mobile device manufacturer from creating a larger format, eye-friendly device that will compete more directly with the Kindle?

Amazon's 190K books won't compare to Google's 7 million and counting. Google may not yet have Amazon's access to best-sellers or Amazon's considerable leverage over print-focused publishers, yet publishers maintain their ability to choose which books to include in both Google's and Amazon's programs.

The Google Book Search agreement offers a way for publishers and authors to get paid to cooperate with Google. With this little sticking point resolved, have no doubt that Google will continue to tear down barriers to information, including Amazon's closed-loop Kindle program.