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Books Target Niche Audiences
USA Today, February 28, 2006 - Google eyes new ad venues: Old Media
Books are old media that have a large niche audience, just like magazines. Books, however, have not yet become a digital asset. Google's ebook store is not just a way for large book publishers to experiment with earning money, but also a way for the "magic middle" in blogs to write a new chapter -- is it new, is it novel, does it solve a business problem. Yep. More content, more ad revenue, more eyeballs. The payment platform associated with Google's browser will be similar to the text messaging service on my daughter's cell phone -- $9.95 for 1,000 text messages. Or, in Google's case -- clicks -- revenue that will begin but not end with ebooks. The ebook store, however, will educate the public on how easy it is to publish ebooks -- just like a blog.
Think about all those pages that you tear out of magazines. Google has. Google will not only be offering its advertisers spots on offline magazine pages, but those magazine pages will become ebooks or epages.
The real question is, "Who is ahead -- Amazon or Google?
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03-13-2006
