Google deal brings classic books to Sony Reader

Sony's e-book reader is about to get a little help from Jane Austen in its battle with the Kindle.

Sony announced a partnership with Google Wednesday night that will bring a half-million classic books to the Sony Reader Digital Book. Users will now be able to access the free book downloads through Sony's eBook Store.

For years, Google has scanned books and converted them to digital format--at least in part--for its Google Book Search project. For now, Google is providing books to Sony whose copyrights have expired, which means most of the new additions to the Sony Reader will have been published before 1923, according to The New York Times.

Sony says the library will include well-read classics such as "The Awakening," "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," and "Sense and Sensibility" as well as less common titles such as the "Letters of Jane Austen" and books in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other languages.

The deal brings the Sony Reader's library up to 600,000 titles (Amazon's Kindle library is currently at about 250,000). Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

[edpatterson]

Not much of a threat to the Kindle. You can get all those and more from Project Gutenberg and copy them over. Just finishing up the Oz series...

[medezark]

@edpatterson -- Exactly. That's why I wasn't impressed with the 100 free books selections for the Sony Reader -- I could already get those books for free from Project G. And there's also the Baen Free Library for your sci-fi needs, and many more sources for your no-budget literary needs.

I haven't used the Kindle, but I love my Sony Reader. That new Fujitsu Color e-book looks like the cats pyjamas though. The screenshot I saw showed it with a web browser open. If it weren't quite so pricy (<> $1000 US?) I'd jump all over it.

[-fjtorres-]

You don't really need a Sony Reader to read these volumes; they're in ePub format suppported by Adobe Reader, Sony's own PC Reader App, a couple of iPhone reader apps, and a dozen or so ebook readers sold by other hardware vendors.
Wonder how long before Sony closes that loophole...

[hafenbrack]

recently Sony's E-reader series has been opening those loopholes by trying to be more of the "open" reader. It's Sony so we all know it will never be completely DRM free, but they do a pretty good job with the E-reader and accomodating most formats.

[dgray2]

"A half-million classic books" do not exist. It would be more accurate to report "A half-million books that are no longer protected by copyright." Age alone does not make a book a classic.

[Mobile.Dev]

This is pretty misleading - these are just scanned versions that are put through a "hi-tech" OCR software. Here is the result. As you can see, it's not always optimal. An excerpt from Jane Austen's Emma. Sorry but I would pay $8 to have an edited book with proper English!

nation enough for ,sh<nsntig""people again how delightfully Mr./lfraokvChurehill and Miss Wood- house dancefoAJijsr doing that in which she need not tlusb^ to ^compare herself with Jane Fairfax ? «tjd eVen for simple dancing itself, without any of 'rllje wicked aids of vanity?to assist him first in '* pacing out the room they were in to see what it could he made to hold ? and then in taking the dimensions of the other parlor, in the hope of discovering, in spite of all that Mr. Weston could say of t

[Zoobie]

That's funny. I downloaded Joan of Arc off Project Guttenburg and it handled all the French accents with garbage. I enjoyed the book, but I never did figure out one of the characters names...

I do love my Sony Reader though and am happy to see they are actually competing with Kindle instead of abandoning the market. The eBook store is awful--they need a grounds-up redo, and they need to get it running on OSX.

[molotov]

Oh, so this is the future of our literature! Who needs to store 50 or so amazing books on their bookshelves; when you can carry 600,000 units! Yes, you heard me: units - NOT books. These units contain errors and misspelled words. Google's scanning technique that causes errors is not alone. I read numerous Kindle reviews on Amazon where people, who were able to tell whether a word was misspelled or not, complained that the books they PAID for had terrible misspellings in them.
These companies that are 'leading' the revolution into the next 'natural' phase of reading figure we will eventually get so dumb that wurd mispellinks wille not be an isshoe fore us. Ironically; they might be right. How many people actually sit down and enjoy the book word by word, re-reading beautifully written sentences? Not many. Most people 'scan' their books with their eyes and hope to finish it in a day to gobble the next book. Gogol must be turning in his grave.

[make_or_break]

A bit like what the publishers of Frank Herbert's 'Dune' mangled on the Kindle...and that one WASN'T free. Asimov's Foundation Trilogy that I bought for my Sony Reader also had quite a few errors; enough so that I had to dust off the REAL paper books to see what the hell was supposed to be said.

[tijaco]

If you need a book scanned to read it on your reader, you could use always services like www.bookscanning.com .

[geneven]

It happens that I just read Emma from Project Gutenberg on my Nokia N810. It certainly didn't have the kinds of typos listed in a message above. In fact, it was a great read. I have read many books from Project Gutenberg and have never had problems figuring out the name of a character.

I am interested in the Sony Reader as it now appears to be claiming to be the reader for consumers who want free books. That's me!

Another comment above said that there were many terrible typos even in commercial books. This is exaggerating wildly. I have read many commercial ebooks, and terrible typos are quite rare. I'm an editor, so I would notice. In most cases, anyway, the quality of a commercial ebook should not be inferior to the printed copy -- if done properly by the publishing company, it would not be scanned in at all.

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