Google is launching its own eBook store long in the making
today, they announced in a blog post. The store is US only right
now and launches with "more than three million titles including
hundreds of thousands for sale" -- meaning the vast majority of
those three million are public domain books.  But the store also
boasts some "bestsellers"like James Patterson's Cross Fire and
Jonathon Franzen's Freedom.  Google recruited several
"independent booksellers" as partners and, in a googly way,
talks about how open its eBook format.  This is a clear shot at
Amazon, whose Kindle eBooks are full of DRM to placate the big
publishers it partners with, and whom independent booksellers
are scared of because they're so huge. Google's books experiment
has always been interesting and this move puts them in even more
direct competition with Amazon. That being said, Amazon has
already opened a huge lead in the eBooks market and we think
it'll be hard to catch up so we'll see how it goes.