Amazon may have helped to jumpstart the e-book industry with its Kindle, Apple may have helped it along with iBooks. Now, search engine giant Google is putting its monumental name into the hat with the official launch of Google eBooks. It’s not like Google is new to digital books, but this is a different beast.

With this new service, you’ll have the ability to buy and read your books online, accessing your digital e-book collection not only on your computer’s browser, but also on mobile apps with Android and iOS, as well as eReader devices that support Adobe Digital Editions. The key is that your e-books are stored in the cloud and not locally. This provides you with unlimited storage, theoretically.

The other main selling point that Google is trying to push is that its eBookstore is open. They’re not forcing you into one device over another. “That means you can acess your ebooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa — using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage.”

That’s the bright side. The not so bright side is that you can’t download your DRM-free e-books from Google to read them on devices that don’t support Adobe Digital Editions. You know, like the Kindle.

[Google]