Google plies at marketing itself at the moment, launching and sending to about 1,500 UK partners and advertisers its nicely laid-out 64-page online magazine that can be read either on e-readers with Flash support or enjoyed as separate web-optimized articles.

Matt Brittin, Google’s UK chief executive: “In a world of accelerating change, we all need time to reflect. Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It’s a place to take time out and consider what’s happening and why it matters.”

Most likely, Google is after a computational approach to delivering information, specifically news.  Many portals are becoming content fronts for the publishing industry, which is taking over digital trends in large part thanks to real-time data sharing and the far-reaching social network platforms, like Facebook.

Last month, Google launched a new payment system for publishers, Google One Pass, through which the company takes only 10% of revenues compared to Apple with 30 percent. Google went even further with digitalizing books, a plan that has been carried out since 2004, now having over 12 million titles, and proposed a settlement of copyright claims that was in the end rejected by a federal court.

“Like many others, we believe this agreement has the potential to open-up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the US today,” said Hilary Ware, managing counsel at Google. “Regardless of the outcome, we’ll continue to work to make more of the world’s books discoverable online through Google Books and Google eBooks.”

In recent years, Google competitor Baidu has faced copyright allegations as well, Baidu and China in general being seen as a haven for piracy of all kinds of products, such as music, videos, books and so on. The company has been testing a technology that ‘eliminates copyright-infringing content already uploaded on its platform, but also enables automatic rejection of future problematic uploads’.

We could say that the digital reading trend is starting to take off if we look at data from International Data Corporation saying that worldwide, 10.1 million tablets were shipped in Q4, up from 4.5 million in Q3. Ereader shipments rose from 3 million in 2009 to 12.8 million in 2010. Boston Consulting Group reveals that the number will certainly increase as tablet and ereader purchase intentions are high, especially among those who are already familiar with the devices. Half of internet users in the US who knew about tablets and ereaders planned to buy one in the next year, and 70% were considering a purchase in the next three years.