If I ever get freetime, I was going to look to see what was available. I went to the books.google site and saw mostly public domain titles that we can probably get from other locations. You had to register at sony and I didn't have time to test that out.Sony e-book reader gets 500,000 books from Google (AP)
NEW YORK - Google Inc. is making half a million books, unprotected by copyright, available for free on Sony Corp.'s electronic book-reading device, the companies were set to announce Thursday.
It's the first time Google has made its vast trove of scanned public-domain books available to an e-book device, and vaults the Sony Reader past Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle as the device with the largest available library, at about 600,000 books.
The scanned books were all published before 1923, and include works like Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" as well as nonfiction classics like Herodotus' "The Histories."
The books are already available as free downloads in the Portable Document Format (PDF), which works well on computer screens but not on e-book readers. Google will provide the books to the Sony Reader in the EPUB (electronic publication) format, which lets the lines flow differently to fit a smaller screen.
Google spokeswoman Jennie Johnson said the company wants to make the books available as widely as possible.
"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."
The publishing industry has more or less united on EPUB for e-book distribution, but Amazon uses its own format for the Kindle. However, unencrypted EPUB files can be converted to a format readable by the Kindle using PC software.
Unlike the Sony Reader, the $359 Kindle has a wireless connection directly to its e-book store, which boasts more than 245,000 titles. To get books onto the Reader, the user first downloads them from Sony's Web site using a computer, then connects the Reader to the computer.
There are two models of the Reader, priced at $300 and $350.
On the Net:
http://www.sony.com/reader
http://books.google.com
http://www.amazon.com/kindle
Why is it a nightmare? I like having them there! I mean, some of them are titles I would like to read on my Kindle, and it's nicer to be able to d/l them over whispernet, and have them backed up in my amazon archive, instead of having to get them elsewhere...mwvickers said:Let's just hope Amazon doesn't "fight back" and pull even more free public domain books into the Kindle store. It's a nightmare as it is.
It's mainly a nightmare for trying to search through to find books. In some cases, you wade through tons of those. Some search tools have made it possible to exclude those now, so it's not quite as bad, but still.webhill said:Why is it a nightmare? I like having them there! I mean, some of them are titles I would like to read on my Kindle, and it's nicer to be able to d/l them over whispernet, and have them backed up in my amazon archive, instead of having to get them elsewhere...
I'm wondering how accurate that number is. Is it 600,000 BOOKS or 600,000 TITLES? As we know, there are many books out there with numerous publications. So it could be 600,000 different "versions" of Moby Dick!r0b0d0c said:Seems pretty misleading, since Kindle can download "over 245,000" books directly to Kindle, plus how many more titles (anyone have a number of public domain books from freebooks, etc.?), whereas don't you need to download to computer first, and THEN to the Sony eReader for ALL titles?
the "600,000" number certainly gives bragging rights and marketing to Sony, for now.
I was thinking sort of the same thing. If a "title" is just a short story or article, then 600000 is not that impressive. Most of the interesting public domain stuff is probably already available from manybooks.net or feedbooks.com. Don't know why they are so excited, for the most part.SongbirdVB said:I'm wondering how accurate that number is. Is it 600,000 BOOKS or 600,000 TITLES?