Interead, makers of the Cool-er e-reader device, is arriving a bit late to the Google Books party. The company is announcing the addition of Google Books’ 1 million public domain titles to its e-book store – a puzzling move given that Google made these exact books available to all in an announcement just last week. For a device lacking wireless capabilities, the availability of Google Books via the Cool-er e-book store seems to offer little advantage. One can only presume this maneuver is in preparation for a rumoured wireless-capable Cool-er device.
Google, on the other hand, continues to tie up device makers in its bid to colonize the entirety of the e-book industry.
Google has taken the wraps off of the latest offering from its Google Books’ project: a million public domain book, available for free in ePub format. As Brandon Badger reveals in his announcement blog post:
I’m excited to announce that starting today, Google Books will offer free downloads of these and more than one million more public domain books in an additional format, EPUB. By adding support for EPUB downloads, we’re hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places. More people are turning to new reading devices to access digital books, and many such phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers have smaller screens that don’t readily render image-based PDF versions of the books we’ve scanned. EPUB is a lightweight text-based digital book format that allows the text to automatically conform (or “reflow”) to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices, works you download from Google Books as EPUBs won’t be tied to or locked into a particular device. We’ll also continue to make available these books in the popular PDF format so you can see images of the pages just as they appear in the printed book.
This announcement expands the availability of Google’s public domain books beyond its partnership with Sony. It’s clear that Google, like Barnes & Noble, is now pursuing a multi-pronged, device-independent approach to establishing itself in the e-book market. A million titles sounds like a good way to entice users to explore their offering – they only question is if that exploration will translate into an ability to sell other, non-public domain books.
Again, one has to wonder what publishers like Penguin and other purveyors of classic literature think of this move?
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.
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.