Sony-Google Partnership Brings 500,000 E-Books to Sony Reader

According to the Associated Press, Google is providing Sony with half a million copyright-free—and just plain free (for users, anyway)—e-books to be made available on Sony’s Readers, currently the only electronic book-reading devices seriously competing with Amazon’s Kindle. With the addition of Google’s cache of e-books, Sony has amassed a library of about 600,000 titles, compared to Amazon’s library of about 250,000.

The New York Times reports that while Sony may have more titles, Amazon continues to have more best sellers and new releases. Since 2004, Google has scanned roughly seven million books from major university and research libraries. The 500,000 titles with which Google is providing Sony are all written before 1923 and are in the public domain, meaning that their copyrights have expired and they are now available for public use. The Times article notes that Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, says that works in the public domain are easy to obtain.

The Times says that Sony Reader users will now be able to download books from the likes of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Kate Chopin. Google encodes its books in ePub, an open electronic publishing platform that the AP report says can be converted to a format readable by the Kindle.

Jennie Johnson, a spokeswoman for Google says in the AP report, “Really our vision is: any book, anywhere, any time and on any device. We want to partner with anybody who shares our vision of making them more accessible.”

For more information about the Sony Readers, visit www.sony.com/reader.