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Google Play Books' Expansion Plan Picks Up its Pace – Expands to the Philippines And 8 Other Countries in Asia

google play booksGoogle has never been one to toot their own horn when they’ve expanded their ebooksttore and today is no exception. I have just learned that Google quietly expanded Google Play Books this week.

This ebookstore is now available in Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam, bring the total number of supported countries to 36. Curiously enough the ebookstore is available in Hong Kong and Taiwan but not China.

Google is going to face competition from Kobo in the Philippines, New Zealand, and Hong Kong (edit: and Singapore), but as far as I know the other 6 countries don’t have any major international competition – aside from iBooks, which may or may not count as serious competition (opinions vary).

This launch is Google’s third major expansion in the past 4 months. They also expanded into Portugal and 3 other European countries in June and then came back and added Hungary, the Netherlands, and 7 more European countries in July.

google play books September

At this point I think there might be a pattern to Google’s expansion. They are adding new local ebookstores in regional clumps, and they also have accelerated their rate of expansion. Google has launched their ebookstore in 22 countries in the past 4 months. In comparison, they only launched in 14 countries in the 30 months since Google opened their ebookstore in December 2010.

I think Google may have worked the bugs out of their system (mostly, anyway). In recent months they’ve updated their acceptable format list to include Epub3, revamped the publisher’s portal,and launched a new section of Google Play Books to sell and rent digital textbooks.

Android Police

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Comments


Ravi September 26, 2013 um 8:18 am

Kobo is also in Singapore (as one of the ex-Borders countries).

So far as I know, iBooks isn’t (except for free books) unless you count address-spoofing. And if you do… I’m pretty sure Kindle wins in a landslide.


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