There’s plenty of free books on the internet. Current ones, too, and legally. Project Gutenberg has an extensive library of free, public domain (or merely out of copyright) works that are easily transferred and read on the reader.
Sony’s gone and trumped all this by making a deal with Google whereas all the public domain books scanned as part of their controversial Google Book Search program — are now available for the Sony PRS 505 and 700 Readers.
The Project Gutenberg books are done on a volunteer basis, so books that don’t interest someone enough to do all the scanning and typo corrections, don’t get there. Google *paid* people to do this, so there’s a good chance at least some percentage of those new 500,000 books have never before been released in electronic form.
Thing is, any public domain work you’ve probably ever heard of has probably already been scanned and is available, though without, perhaps, being formatted specifically for the Readers.
How can you possibly find which of those half million are worth reading? These, after all, are probably not the works which stood the test of time…
Dear Fellow Reader,
We are happy to announce a new addition to The eBook Store from Sony. Starting this week you can access more than half a million free public domain books from Google optimized for current models of the Reader*. Click on the Google banner on the home page to search for books that you can preview and transfer to your PRS-505 or PRS-700 at no cost.
The current Reader Digital Book by Sony presents an open platform which makes it easy to access a wide variety of content — whether that content is purchased, borrowed from a library, or free. We will continue to provide premium content through our eBook Store and we hope you will enjoy this added benefit from Google.
Thank you,
The eBook Store Team
Sony finally has their enormous inventory of books, and it looks like there’s another gadget on my wish list. 🙂 Even if there is plenty of chaff in the selection there are sure to be some obscure gems in the haystack as well!
No no no Kasul. If you just want a large inventory of books I can fix you up with a typewriter and a monkey to bang the keys. The investment of time and concentration into reading a book is considerable so we need to be choosy and having a large amount of random writings selected only on the basis that they are free does not make it any easier to be choosy.
I wouldn’t buy a reader just for this. To be honest, if my eyes weren’t crappy, I doubt I would be interested at all.
Okay, actually, am in the ebook store, there are some quality titles here.
I downloaded a bunch of Google public domain books to my Sony Reader and — wow, I guess nobody looked at these files! FULL of scanning errors, garbled text…. This isn’t Sony’s fault. I don’t see how Google can proudly claim to be preserving our heritage by scanning old works if those old works are mangled.