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?