The Hindu : Front Page : More books for Sony e-book reader

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Friday, Mar 20, 2009
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More books for Sony e-book reader

The Amazon Kindle

NEW YORK: Google is making half a million non-copyrighted books available for free on Sony’s electronic book-reading device.

It is the first time that Google has made its vast trove of scanned public-domain books available to an e-book device,. It thus vaults the Sony Reader past Amazon.com’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 Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and nonfiction classics including 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.

A Google spokeswoman 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. 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 has more than 245,000 titles.

To get books on to the Reader, the user first downloads them from Sony’s website using a computer, then connects the Reader to the computer.

There are two models of the Reader, priced at $300 and $350. — AP

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