A new competitor for Amazon.com?

One of the overlooked bits of news to come out of last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was Google's suggestion that it would get into the online bookselling business.

The search company's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said inclusion in the store would depend on permission from copyright owners. Apparently the new initiative would be a premium version of Google Book Search, in which users would pay for downloading part or all of the books that publishers have approved for inclusion in Google's index.

Google has gotten lots of bad publicity from the Book Search initiative, but publishers interested in selling their content online haven't been shy about signing onto the program. And Google maintains that the program is all about preserving knowledge.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com has said it's already working on a similar program it calls "Amazon Pages."