Sony and Google reprised their partnership announcement today by adding another 500K public domain books from the Google Books project to the Sony Reader device. Combining this with the 500K titles that Google added to the Sony Reader in March means that Sony users now have 1M public domain titles to choose from. For free.
Is anyone at Penguin or one of those other “classics” publishing houses noticing this? While the quality may not be as good as a reader might normally expect, free is a pretty hard price to beat.
This just in: Amazon.com has reached out across the ether and deleted illegal copies of George Orwell’s “1984″ from over 150 Kindle users. Ironic? Yes. Scary? Hell yes.
It appears that the copies in question had been sold by an independent author using Amazon’s Digital Text Platform – Amazon’s platform for allowing any author to upload and sell books to Kindle users. It just so happens that one of those authors uploaded (and sold) copies of works by George Orwell that are not in the public domain in the United States (although they are in the public domain in Canada, Australia, and other jurisdictions). Authors are required to assert they have the rights to publish a book when they use Amazon to publish books for the Kindle, but apparently the publisher in question just plum forgot.
It’s oddly appropriate that it should be Orwell’s story of a dystopian future ruled by an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-controlling leader that is at the center of this latest development. Richard Stallman warned in his 1997 parable “The Right to Read” of a future in which those who control our computing devices would impede our ability to share experiences. This latest incident with Amazon only underscores the risk to readers: the book you purchased are not under your control.
Here’s a clever way to take a stale publishing business and revitalize it using new technology: Freehand Music is the first publisher to begin publication of piano sheet music for the Amazon Kindle (the large-screen Kindle DX version specifically).
While the scores may appear a bit pricey at between $1 and $4 each, the pricing appears to be on par with the typical discount seen thus far for electronic books. [via Wired]
The e-book industry is shaping up quickly: last week, Borders UK announced its own e-book reader, developed in conjunction with with Elonex. They join Barnes and Noble (who is rumored to be releasing a device) and Amazon.com as a new breed of bookseller/publisher that is attempting to avoid suffering the same fate as the music industry:
The moves by Borders and in the future by Barnes & Nobles is also attempt to stave off a fate that music retail stores have faced as records went digital, says Epps. Still the transition is unlikely to be easy.
“It’s not a pretty picture right now for brick-and-mortar retailers,” says Epps. “E-books sales are growing but they can’t nearly bring in the same kind of revenue as physical books do,” she says.
Wired’s analysis of the situation missed one set of industry players: the publishers. While all of the e-reader vendors are currently dependent on publishers to provide content, that may change. Services, such as Amazon.com’s Digital Text Platform, could allow authors to sidestep the traditional publisher route either by publishing through the device seller, or publishing on their own site in standard formats (such as epub or PDF).
Which begs the question: when every bookstore is effectively a publisher, and authors have the ability to publish either through a device or directly, will there be any room left for publishers in the industry? It may end up that the publishers are the ones who should be worried about suffering the fate of the music industry, not the booksellers.
Google made its intentions clear today by announcing a deal with Sony to make a half-million public domain titles available for Sony Reader users. For free.
The announcement not only signals that Sony is serious about competing against Amazon, but also that Google clearly has plans in the online book space overall. The company’s Google Books project has been scanning books forever, despite the concerns of publishers over scanning of copyrighted works. This latest move sidesteps that problem by only offering books that are out of copyright, but opens the doors for Google to demonstrate the opportunity for publishers to reach readers through its platform.
For the moment, Sony will get to crow about having a far larger library of titles than the Amazon Kindle. However, that claim may not last long if Google partners with multiple device vendors in a bid to dominate the market through device-independence.