As a market, ebooks and ereaders have gone from being relatively simple with a few major players to tangled web of content providers and hardware manufacturers of varying compatibility in just a few short years. The competition promises to keep prices low, features competitive and digital-rights management minimal, but it’s become overwhelming for casual consumers to step into the market and look beyond the staid pillars of Amazon of Barnes & Noble.

This economy entropy is poised to get even worse (or better, depending on your perspective) with Google announcing that they have partnered with iriver to bring the first ever ereader integrated with their open Google eBooks platform.

Called the Story HD, iriver’s ereader most closely resembles a third generation Kindle, with a full QWERTY keyboard at the bottom, integrated dictionary, built-in Wi-Fi and the standard-issue 6-inch eInk screen that we have all come to know and love. It’s a full ounce lighter than the Kindle, but is ever so slightly thicker. With two GB of storage, it can hold half the books that a Kindle can, but honestly, how many people are actually running against that capacity limit?

The real story is the integration of the Google eBookstore. So far as we can tell, it hasn’t made a tremendous splash in the ebook market, mostly due to the fact that at just eight months old, it’s not well-integrated with the most popular eReaders on the market. There are definitely lots of novelties to be found with it. The Doodle Mode on their browser reader is a nice digital distraction for kids, who can color, do mazes and the like.

Google has also done an admirable job promoting their affiliate program. While authors can certainly make money by setting up accounts with Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the Google eBookstore seems to have better terms for authors and is ubiquitous in the book blogosphere. They’re even making an impact on old-fashioned book stores. Politics and Prose is one of the more popular independent book stores in Washington D.C., for instance, and they have integrated Google eBooks onto their homepage to give eReader addicts a way to support their local establishment without having to clutter their house with dead tree editions.

Google is definitely carving out a niche, but whether this iriver reader is a serious part of their long-term strategy remains to be seen. At $140 and retailing only at Target, it doesn’t seem destined for success, but time will tell.

With the requisite fanfare beholden a multi-billion dollar company, Google took the wraps off their newest project this month: the Google eBookstore. Purported to be the largest collection of ebooks for sale in the world, the eBookstore is home to more than three million titles, 2.8 million of which are free. (Don’t get too excited, they’re mostly out-of-print titles with scant mainsteam interest, but still! They’ve also struck a deal with the six major publishers to carry most of the popular new releases that hit shelves elsewhere.

Launching a fourth major source for ebooks might seem a tad redundant, but Google actually has a halfway decent sales pitch. They have positioned themselves as the “open” alternative to Amazon, selling their books in a variety of formats suitable for reading on the iPad, on smartphones, and even the Barnes & Noble Nook. Indeed, just about the only device that the Google eBookstore doesn’t seem to support is Amazon’s Kindle. Amazon was once the multi-platform king, but it seems they have been usurped by the open format strategy.

Another area in which Google appears to be drinking Amazon’s milkshake is in their “cloud” approach to multi-platform reading. Just like Amazon’s Whispersync technology, Google tracks where you are in a given book and allows you to continue reading from one device to the next, making the work available by means of “the cloud.” They even include real page numbers instead of imaginary ones when tracking your progress, which is a surprisingly novel concept.

The future of the Google eBookstore sounds promising. Their early materials spoke of adding social media layers to the store to enable a sort of community reading experience amongst friends. The search giant even talked about potentially bundling a physical copy of books alongside digital ones. So Google at least has some new ideas for the space.

Unfortunately, the part of the ebook strategy that Google isn’t so keen on changing is the one we’re most interested in seeing change – the pricing structure. As part of the company’s effort to court the major publishers, it ceded total control of pricing over to the publishers. It was likely a necessary step towards preventing another Google TV debacle with content providers, but it also seriously undermines the company’s ability to anything terribly exciting in the space. Instead, they seem just happy to take their cut and run.

So at the end of the day, should you abandon your content provider of choice and join the Google revolution? Not if you’re a Kindle owner, prefer a larger selection of in-print titles to purchase, or are just happy where your books are now. For those who read on their iPad or Nook, who have a thing for out-of-print titles, and for those whom the term “cloud” actually means something, there’s at least one more place to consider.

In a recent publishing-industry panel hosted at Random House’s New York offices, Google’s manager for strategic-partner development Chris Palma announced her company’s plans to unveil a new service early this summer. Called Google Editions, it will represent Google’s attempt to break into the book-selling business by offering a cross-platform marketplace for the written word. Google hopes to use their considerable industry bulk to push publishers of all shapes and sizes into their new store, where users can then purchase titles that will work on any device you can imagine.

It’s a bigger competitive advantage than you might think. Amazon sells books in their proprietary AZW file format, which doesn’t work outside of the Kindle and Amazon’s select software suites for the PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Blackberry. It’s caged content. Even Barnes & Noble utilizes a DRM version of the EPUB standard, which is much more portable than AZW, but still protected. Google is promising to lower the gates for consumers, tying books to a customer’s Google account, making them available on any device with a web browser. Oddly enough, Google hasn’t actually said how they plan to sidestep the biggest problem of an open marketplace like this – sharing and piracy.

Whatever Google is planning, it’s managed to assuage the major publishers, most of whom have already climbed onboard, according to recent reports. Google plans to have as many as four millions books, more than half out of print, available from Day One. When you stop and consider the long, hard slog that Amazon has had to go through to try and keep the prices of eBooks at reasonable levels, it’s interesting that Google has been able to just walk into this industry and lay down the law. They’ve convinced these big companies that it’s in their best interest to support a platform that seems to totally break down the copyright measures that they’ve fought so hard to put in. And they did it without Amazon’s retail track record OR having sold a single unit. I guess the pubs just took Google’s corporate motto “Don’t be evil,” as a promise in good faith.

However much this ends up taking away from the book industry’s bottom line, this is good news for readers. Barnes & Noble currently sets the industry standard for sharing, and even they only allow you to lend a book to a single person for a short period of time. If Google’s platform is really as share-happy as it’s been made out to be, you’ll be able to give anybody access to your entire library for free. Given the option to buy the same book in two different stores, are you going to buy the version from the store that you can only read on your authorized device or are you going to buy the version that you can share? I don’t think there’s any question.

With Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and now Google in the book-selling business, eBooks are taking it big, and competition on this scale usually favors the consumer. More than ever though, it’s important to be aware from whom you buy you media. The best way to get companies to lower their prices and drop draconian rights-management measures is by voting with your wallet. That’s the only way they’ll listen.