New York — Sony Corp. is the latest to enter the race to offer the largest e-bookstore inventory as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble already vying for top spot. Sony on Wednesday said that owners of its Reader e-book device can now access more than one million public domain books from the Google Books library, spanning classics, biographies, historical texts and manuscripts.
Sony says that the addition of Google’s library meant that it now has the largest inventory for e-books, as back in March it made a deal with Google, but then its library only housed around 500,000 titles. It also has an additional 200,000 popular books for sale, including nearly all of the current bestsellers.
The e-books are free and void of copyright, available for two Sony Reader models, accessed by downloading the Google Books software.
Sony, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble Inc and others are competing to beef up their offerings to meet increasing demand for digital books on electronic readers: tablet-like devices where whole books can be stored and read.
However, early this month, BarnesandNoble.com LLC, announced that it had 700,000 e-book titles available, including more than half a million from Google in the public domain.
A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman said today that the Google public domain books are not exclusively available to Sony, and that Barnes & Noble would also have access to Google’s e-books.
“We are not saying a number of how many we have available,” the spokeswoman said, but she added that the figure was clearly higher than 700,000. With the Google number doubled to 1 million, Barnes & Noble could have as many as 1.2 million, putting it in a tie with Sony.
Comparatively, Amazon.com Inc. is another big rival in the e-bookstore war, offerng more than 300,000 titles available for its Kindle e-book readers and Apple iPhones and iPod Touch devices.
Titles, available in the EPUB format and enhanced for Sony Reader, include classics, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” as well as a host of biographies, historical texts, romance novels and other genres.
Sony’s e-books are available on its two e-readers, the PRS-505 and the PRS-700.
Sony Reader users in the United States can download and transfer any of these titles to their PRS-505 or PRS-700 Reader, which also supports personal documents and music files and all the while offers up to 7,500 pages of continuous reading before the battery must be recharged, here.
The new eBook Store users can access available titles after creating an account and downloading Sony’s free eBook Library software.
“We are proud to offer access to the broadest range of eBooks today — from hot new releases, to New York Times Best Sellers, to classics and hard-to-find manuscripts such as those available for free from Google,” Chris Smythe, director of the eBook Store from Sony, said in a statement.
The announcement is the latest in a series of industry moves as the three early adopters grapple for a foothold in the nascent e-book market.
However, to a certain extent it is quite early, but Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle are positioned to win the war over which digital handhelds users download digital books to for reading. Google, meanwhile, continues to face scrutiny over its ambitious book search project.