Google kicks Amazon in the Kindle Escalating the ebook wars, Google has backed Sony's Reader Digital Book with more than half a million public-domain titles coded in the open ePub format. The move, announced today, gives Sony's eBook store more than 600,000 titles in total, dwarfing the roughly 245,000 closed-format titles currently available for the much- …
This is really great news in opening up the whole ebook platform, which is great, and upping the DRM vs. open debate. Amazon has had a great closed ecosystem, this may give them the pressure to loosen up a bit.
Meanwhile, its pretty obvious that none of the press on this has actually SEEN a book scanned by Google. The fact is, the OCR is about 98% accurate, and despite doing some great auto-formatting for recognizing chapter breaks and such, there is plenty of garbage left in there and you are not getting a bona fide "bought book" experience.
That said, it's hard to argue with half a million otherwise totally arcane books that can be downloaded into a tolerably readable format. However, if you're reading a classic as touted in the PR, like Mark Twain or Charles Dickens -- pay the $2 or whatever to acquire a truly well formatted book.
Ok Sony. Where is the update for the PSP with the PDF reader in it. It should have been in the original firmware......How many PSP's are there out there?....millions. Get with the program Sony!
It's just ridiculous! Another piece of electronics that does just one thing! Green, very Green Now they have the PSP channel, you would think that a reader with access to content would be the next logical step..
Sony. Please, Please Update the firmware on the PSP and get rid of that ridiculous reader.
eBooks go the way of the pirate bay (if they haven't already).
DRM is inherently defeatable, which has been shown numerous times before.
Authors typically don't have the public performance revenue stream of music artists, how are they going to make any money ? Where's the incentive for an author to write any more books if there is no revenue model.
The only thing stopping this from happening is a few old fogies who grew up with real paper books, who find reading books on a computer screen or electronic device tedious.
The people behind Google must realise this, I'm not so sure about Sony, they still seem to think they can stop internet piracy. Is Google intentionally trying to destroy the book market, and what is in it for them?
Unfortunately, it's not true that you can actually "download the [ePub titles] from the Sony eBook store free of charge". The only thing you can actually download is a Windows-only "eBook Library Software" application, which purportedly can be used to download the "free" titles for you.
I make heavy use of my PRS-505, but I'm damned if I'm going to patronise a shop that erects those sorts of obstacles to using their product...
Can anyone advise if it is possible to use a proxy server located in the US/Can to access the eBook stores there (for free ebooks). Also, I understand that in the USA you can buy pre-paid credit cards - in which case it should be possible to get a USA based friend to buy the card for you, send you the card details (a trusted friend obviously) and then you can use the pre-paid credit card to pay US/Can prices for retail ebooks.
I have the PC based Mobipocket reader on my laptop and my netbook and use Gutenberg.org to get free e-books. I did look at a major US ebook selling site and was happy with the prices that I saw there and tried to buy an ebook. The site then told me it was for US/Can sales only - damn. So, I went to a UK ebook site and quickly noticed that the prices were twice as much as in the US - double damn.
I'll stay with Gutenberg for now and try Google, for out of copyright 'classics'. I'll maybe start buying ebooks in the future - if the time ever comes when I don't get the feeling that I'm being ripped off.
The Sony book store is US only. The UK is served by their tie in with Waterstones. Can anyone see them give away free books (considering their ebooks are often more expensive than hardback equivalents!).
I bought a Sony reader for the other half, and now buy all books for it from fictionwise.
Nice idea, shame that you have to know what you want before you go in the shop. would be much better if you could just browse the shelves and select the *free* books you want, instead of having to ask the shop keeper to go and find it for you.
I all ready have enough books i want to read to keep me going for some time, but if i could just have a glance through what's on offer, i may find something i didnt previously know about.
Even before the pirate bay and the web etc... people have scanned, ocred, typed, etc... books into digital formats and made them available for others to read.
I prefer to buy the real book and would like to get the electronic form drm-free along the way. There are people that sell drm-free a lot. There are even those that offer the electronic forms free while they sell the paper variety.
I'm actually preping my own eBook of Poetry atm to release drm-free for non-commercial distribution.
A number of Publishers already offer a large number of their books as free/cheap eBooks for download. You get the real book with no more errors than the printed copy and their rationale is that it is no different from lending someone a copy of a book. If you like the book you are likely to buy more books by that author and no matter how handy it is to have them in electronic format, you certainly will not be taking your eReader (if that isn't a registered name then it's mine now) on a budget airline to some cheap hotel in a cheap resort for a beach holiday, you will take a few physical books themselves. Also, no matter how clever they get with screen technology, there is no way they will be able to produce a screen readable in all lighting conditions where you can read a real book at a price which people would be willing to pay.
It is not a case of one format or another, both eBook and paper books can co-exist quite happily.
You have to visit the Sony store in the US, and register. But you don't need a CC - you can just download into the eBook Library software and it works.
But as the first commenter noted, the books are close to unreadable.
Also, that half-million books includes things like old auction and library catalogues - not exactly what you'd call everyday reading.
Not that impressed. There are better sources of free books.
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