Google Partners With Sony … Is SEO Around The Corner For E-Books?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

In the past if you wanted to read an e-book you had to either download a .pdf file or buy an expensive e-book reader like Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s eBook Reader. The biggest problem with e-books is that the formats from one reader to another have never been compatible. Kindle has its own format. Sony has its. And Microsoft has its. If you buy or download a free e-book for one reader and you want to, by any chance, read it on another reader you’ll have to download that book for the other reader – if it’s available. There is no cross over.

Greg Sterling at Screenwerk has an interesting observation:

I could imagine a market (in a few years) where people use these readers for “throwaway” fiction and non-fiction and spend money selectively on physical books — i.e., only those they want to keep.

Well, yeah. Isn’t it kind of going that way now?

But what if somehow Google made it possible to receive link juice to help with a long term search engine optimization strategy from e-books being read in Sony’s eBook Reader. There would be an incentive to publishers to start producing e-books for the Sony format. That would certainly make Sony’s reader more competitive with Amazon’s Kindle. However, that wouldn’t necessarily give any additional incentive to consumers to purchase the Sony reader or to read any of the books formatted for it. Still, what if?