By the time Google eBookstore finally launched on Monday, it was already being touted as a revolution in the marketplace for digital books. It offers more titles — nearly 3 million free, public domain books and “hundreds of thousands” of newer books available for purchase — than any other retailer, and promises every customer “seamless” cloud-based access to their personal e-book library from (almost) any device, no matter where they are.

Whether these features will mean much to the average e-book reader, however, is another matter. Sales of e-books have grown by triple-digit rates in the past year, and industry experts predict no immediate end to the expansion, given that e-reader devices and tablet computers are expected to be popular gifts this holiday season. For every person I’ve met who swears she will never be lured away from her beloved print books, there’s another who raves about finally reading “Middlemarch” on his smart phone during his daily wait for the bus and someone else who reports devouring twice as many books as she did before she got a Kindle.

But if the e-book boom shows us anything, it’s that there’s an infinite variety to what people want from their books. For some, the immateriality of an e-book is a deal-breaker — they can’t pass it on to a friend or sell it to a used bookstore once they’re done with it. For others (like me), this is a feature, not a bug; I can retain a copy of it without having to clear space in the overflowing shelves of my small apartment, and I never have to figure out where I put the thing if I happen to want it in the future. (I’m always misplacing books, so this is a big plus for me.)

Google eBookstore addresses a complaint many have lodged against Amazon’s Kindle: The books bought for it can only be read using Kindle software. This would be a major problem if there weren’t Kindle apps for iOS and Droid devices, as well as for Windows and Mac computers; I don’t own a Kindle, but I own several Kindle e-books and read them on my iPhone and iPad. What I can’t do with my Kindle books is read them on a friend’s iPad during a visit, or on a shared work computer if I want, say, to point out an interesting passage to a colleague. Google’s e-books will be accessible via a user’s Google account from any device that runs a Web browser (that includes tablet computers and smart phones), as well as via apps designed to run on various mobile platforms. I can also read my Google e-books on a Nook or Sony Reader, should I ever decide to buy one, something I can’t do with Kindle titles. But remember: You also can’t use your Kindle to read any e-books you buy from Google.

So let’s review: Google eBooks is a big improvement on the Kindle (still the most popular dedicated e-reader device) if you anticipate wanting to switch from one dedicated e-reader device to another, but if you’re switching to an iPad, then it’s a wash. On the other hand, if you’re a student at the library one afternoon without your Kindle or iPad and you want to be able to access a Kindle book you bought for a class, you’re out of luck. (If that last example strikes you as an exotic scenario, bear in mind that while Kindles are the most popular dedicated e-reader devices, the majority of people who read e-books still read them on a laptop or desktop computer, and many of these readers are students.) Your Google e-books, however, can be read on the library’s computer using a Web browser. But hold on a minute! — Amazon just announced that it will be introducing its own Web-browser-based Kindle reader in a month or so.

In other words, figuring out which e-book system will best meet your needs is really, really confusing. News reports on the latest developments tend to be full of glaring errors — the most common assumption being that you have to have a Nook or a Kindle e-reading device to read Nook or Kindle e-books. And keep in mind that there are also several other smaller e-book formats, devices and vendors, every one of which offers the same public domain titles. If you want to read mostly classics, you might prefer the look of one of these other formats to that of any of the major players. One advantage to the iPad/iPhone is that I’m able to buy and read Kindle, Nook, Stanza and Google e-books as well as use public-domain-only apps like Eucalyptus, a favorite of one of my Salon colleagues. Most public-domain book apps are free, but she was willing to pay for Eucalyptus (which, alas, has only been released for the iPhone) because its superior design makes reading that much easier.

If you’re intrigued by e-books but don’t want to deprive your local independent bookstore of your patronage, Google eBooks may have the answer to your dilemma. Google has formed partnerships with several indie bookstores, enabling them to sell Google eBooks from their websites for a cut of the sales. This a great way to support neighborhood bookstores and it also allows Google eBookstore customers to partake of the expertise of people whose life’s work is connecting readers with the right books. Booksellers also make the best ambassadors to late adapters. The explanation of Google eBooks on the website of the legendary Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, for example, is much clearer and more comprehensive than the one offered by Google itself.

Then there’s the issue of selection. I don’t doubt that Google eBooks carries more titles than the Kindle store, but that distinction is only meaningful if the additional titles happen to be books you want, and you can figure out how to find them. I spent a few hours banging around on Google eBookstore, comparing it primarily to Amazon’s Kindle store, and came up with some interesting results.

The first is that Google eBookstore isn’t necessarily easy to search — an irony considering that the Google empire was built on search. There’s only one search field in which to enter terms, and while it’s possible to delimit the search by using such formulations as “inauthor:’George Meredith'”, this isn’t explained anywhere and there’s no advanced search page allowing you to specify that you only want to see results with, say, the title “Diana of the Crossways” and the author “George Meredith.”

Because Google eBookstore is somewhat awkwardly integrated with Google Books, a vast library of full and partial scanned texts designed more as a research tool than a store, it returns a lot more results than you get from searching Amazon. Those results will include every book that even mentions “Diana of the Crossways” or “Meredith,” in addition to the book I actually wanted, “Diana of the Crossways” by George Meredith. All these extraneous titles are merely annoyingly if you happen to have gotten all your search terms right, but I misremembered the title of this Victorian novel as “Diana of the Crossroads,” and got a pageful of results many of which didn’t seem to have anything to do with the book, such as a 1910 law text titled “The Constitution of the United States: Its History Application and Construction.”