Google’s eBooks will now be available in the United States from a new Google eBook store, which will offer more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale. With the official launch of Google eBooks, it has become the third major e-books retailer alongside Amazon and Apple.

Unlike Amazon and Apple, Google is not selling consumers a reading device. Instead, its books are platform agnostic and can be read on smart phones, desktops, tablets, the Nook and Sony eReader — pretty much everything except the Kindle.

Google Editions is expected to offer a “read anywhere” business model, with ebooks available from Google itself as well as other online retailers, tied together by a single Google online account to create a virtual library. Users will be able to access their library on a variety of web-enabled devices through the browser.

The electronic books market is currently dominated by Amazon.com, which helped establish the market with the release of its Kindle reading device in 2007 and has a roughly two-thirds share of the U.S. market, according to Forrester Research.

Google is working with all of the big six major publishing houses — Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Simon and Schuster and Macmillan — and thousands of smaller publishers to offer more than 250,000 in-print books for sale. Google eBooks will also launch with about 2.7 million public-domain books in its store, which can be accessed for free.

Most of the millions of books that Google scanned from major world libraries will not be available until the litigation surrounding the Google book-search settlement agreement reaches its conclusion. Once it got settled, it is expected that those books will be rolled into Google’s ebookstore.

Google is also unveiling a new eBooks Web Reader that will allow users to buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud.

via latimes