Google has finally began its challenge to Amazon and Apple’s dominance of the e-books market on Monday, almost two years after it first announced its plans for an online bookstore.

Google has launched this in US with “hundreds of thousands” of books for sale and almost 3m available for free. The store is expected to arrive in Europe and Asia next year. Books can be bought through apps for devices based on Google’s Android software, including the recent Samsung Galaxy Tab, as well as Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

The books will also be accessible via Google’s EBooks web reader from mobile phones, PCs or dedicated e-book readers, all stored on Google’s “cloud” of remote servers, as with its Gmail and Picasa photo services. This also allows independent booksellers with loyal customer bases to advertise and sell Google e-books via their own venues and take an undisclosed cut of the revenue, an opportunity previously denied to them. It also allows consumers to choose whom to purchase their books from on Google's platform, just as consumers can choose between third-party sellers on Amazon. Google E-books is also launching with an affiliates program in place.

This is a very smart move by Google's, as the company will have potentially thousands of booksellers and affiliates marketing on behalf of its service. It seems that currently there are 4,000 publishers that would be providing content through Google E-books.

One very sad aspect of this kind of move is The growing embrace of digital sales by the publishing industry which would result in the closure of hundreds more book stores during the next few years, adding to a media mortuary of music and video merchants killed by electronic distribution.

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