Google Loses Groupon Deal, Unveils Google eBooks

Have you heard?

Google offered to buy groupon.com for $6 Billion dollars.  That's Billion with a capital B.

THEY TURNED IT DOWN.

Holy moly.  Now that's what I call brazen.  Gus (my husband) said "If Google offers you six billion dollars for your company... you're gonna take it... right?"

So, why did Groupon turn this down?  Truthfully, I don't know the answer.  I haven't had time to research it (if you know, please post a comment and enlighten us).  But what I do know is that this means online coupons are BIG BIG BIG. 

If your company already offers regular coupons, offering online coupons is a no-brainer.  If your company doesn't offer coupons, or some other kind of special offer, you need to start.  I'm going to.  Just as soon as I have a couple hours free to figure out how.  I'll keep you posted on that.  In the meantime, here's an interesting blog post on the event from Business Insider.

The other interesting thing that happened this week was Google's announcement of Google eBooks.  Now, THIS is huge.

I have a Kindle and I love it.  But I love Google more than Amazon.  The reason I love Google more is because Google gives me LOTS OF FREE STUFF. 

As we all know, Google makes their money from advertisers. This, along with the fact that they offer the most relevant search results on the planet, allows them to get a huge market share of the search business.  So they don't have to charge their users, they charge their advertisers for the priviledge of getting in front of the users (US).  Everyone wins!

So what this means is that I'll be able to get lots of Google eBooks for free or very low cost.  But even if I have to pay for some of them, I'm fine with that.  The really cool thing is that I can access all my books, free and paid, from anywhere, using any device, including my Kindle!

Amazon requires that you have either a Kindle device or the Kindle App in order to read Kindle books.  I think Google's model of putting everying in the cloud is much better, don't you think? 

Um... why didn't Amazon think of this?

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