Mountain View, California — Google is quickly following the race to keep pace with the industry leader, today announced that it would embrace the EPUB digital book format for its distribution of digital books, allowing users to download over 1 million public domain books, which is an open and free industry standard for electronic books, giving the standard a significant boost in the ongoing tussle for a dominant digital book format.
In recent months, EPUB format is supported by a wide variety of different applications, and is one of the dominant formats for digital books. Sony two weeks ago also said it would begin selling digital books in the format, and now Google is following the footstep in the same direction, so it should be easy for many people to access literature this way.
EPUB, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum and backed by companies such as Adobe Systems, Random House, Harlequin and OverDrive, is a technology standard that strives to be what MP3 is to digital music files and MPEG is to video.
However, Google’s acceptance promotes the format’s standing in the market but by no means guarantees its place as the de facto standard. Users can download the public domain books by simply clicking the “download” button in the Google Books Toolbar, which provides a drop-down menu to choose the file format.
“We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture,” says Product Manager Brandon Badger. “We began digitizing these books because we thought it was important for people to be able to find and read them, and we want them to be able to do so anywhere — not just when they happen to be at a computer. This feature takes us one step closer towards realizing that goal by helping support open standards that enable people to access these books in more places, on more devices and through more applications.”
In the past, Google Books could be downloaded in the PDF format, but some devices do not have screens that can render image-based PDF versions of books well. This should help with that problem.
EPUB: The One eBook Standard to Rule them All
EPUB is a free, standardized format that just about every hardware eReader or desktop software understands. The EPUB format enables text to automatically adapts to smaller screens, so they can be viewed properly on phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers. Google will still continue to offer downloads in the PDF format as well.
The standard is being enforced to more than 1 million public domain books that Google has digitized. Aside from the Sony Reader, devices that can display EPUB books include the iPhone (using the Stanza application), Hanlin eReader, Cool-ER and the upcoming Plastic Logic device.
Other EPUB’s competing formats is the Kindle, Amazon’s branded format employed by its digital reader to display digital books purchased at its online bookstore.