Google has announced that it plans to enter the growing market for electronic books, launchnig an online e-book store in direct competition to Amazon.

The search giant said that books from the new service, Google Editions, will be available in the first half of next year. The books will be readable on any device with a web browser – meaning users will no longer need a dedicated e-book reader such as Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader.

Google said it will initially offer 500,000 e-books in partnership with publishers it already works with, where they have the digital rights. Users will be able to buy e-books directly from Google as well as through online stores such as Amazon.com, but the company intends to make them all searchable.

However, Google ruled out taking on Amazon with a reading device of its own. “We're not focused on a dedicated e-reader or device of any kind,” said Tom Turvey, Google's director of strategic partnerships, at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Google is joining a small, but burgeoning market. Forrester, the technology research firm, estimates that 3 million e-book readers will be sold in the United States this year, from a previous base of about 1 million, helped by lower prices, more content and better distribution.

Analysts said, however, that the price of e-book devices must fall further before they can be considered anything but a niche, luxury product. Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader hover at around the £200 mark when all costs are taken into account.

Google Editions will for the first time allow the company to make money out of one of its book ventures - which also include a controversial project to scan and index tens of millions of books through partnerships with libraries. Mr Turvey said Google would give publishers 63 per cent of revenues and keep 37 per cent for itself where it sold e-books directly to consumers.

Last week, Amazon said it would introduce an “international” version of its Kindle, with people in over 100 countries, including Britain, able to buy the device for the first time. The U.S. Bookseller Barnes & Noble is also reportedly launching its own reader, and Microsoft is rumoured to be planning a similar machine.

Meanwhile, Google is still trying to settle an American lawsuit with U.S. publishers and authors over its Google Books project, in which it has already scanned about 10 million books through partnerships with libraries, and plans to scan many more.

The American Association of Publishers and the Authors Guild have sued Google for scanning some books without copyright holders' permission. The parties reached a $125 million settlement, but a U.S. judge has ordered that several details of the deal be changed; the revised settlement is due for submission next month.

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