Sony e-book reader to get 500,000 books from Google

March 22, 2009 · Filed Under News · Comment

Google Inc. will be making around 50,000 unprotected by copyright books, available for free on Sony Corp’s electronic book-reading device. this would be the first time that the search engine giant, Google, has made a gigantic collection of scanned public-domain books available to an e-book device.

This will make the Sony Reader as the device with the largest available library, at about 600,000 books, even more than Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle.

All of the scanned books were published before 1923. the books include the impressive works of Charles Dickens’ including, “A Tale of Two Cities”; nonfiction classics like Herodotus’ “The Histories.”

The free downloads of the Portable Document Format (PDF) formats of the books are already available. However these do not work on any e-reading devices. Google will be providing the EPUB (electronic publication) format of the books to the Sony Reader. This format allows the lines to flow differently to fit a smaller screen.

Jennie Johnson, Google’s spokeswoman said, “Really our vision is: any book, anywhere, any time and on any device,” she said. “We want to partner with anybody who shares our vision of making them more accessible.”

Tags: Amazon.com, e-book reader, Google, Kindle, PDF, Sony