San Francisco — Sony Corp. has made an alliance with Google Inc. to provide more than 500,000 public domain books scanned by the search giant to users of its electronic book reader, Sony said on Thursday, greatly increasing the amount of available content on the device. The deal would certainly catch the attention of Amazon, which has been building its Kindle e-book device into a respectable business.
In the latest round of a growing digital book battle with Amazon.com Inc., Sony said that more than half a million classic titles will be offered free through Sony’s eBook Store service, which empowers consumers to read books and newspapers on a hand-held device. Users can access the collection through their PCs or through Sony’s PRS-505 and PRS-700 Reader devices.
The move will augment the eBook Store’s collection of books to more than 600,000 titles available for download.
“We have focused our efforts on offering an open platform and making it easy to find as much content as possible, from our store or others, whether that content is purchased, borrowed or free,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s the digital reading business division.
“Working with Google, we can offer book lovers another avenue for free books while still providing a seamless experience from our store.”
Public domain books, be it Jane Austin’s “Persuasion” or Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, are no longer protected by copyright.
Amazon sells more than 245,000 books for the Kindle, as well as various newspapers, magazines, and blog content.
A spokesperson for Google stated that Google’s interest in the deal arises from its mission to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. Its arrangement with Sony follows a similar announcement in February when Google offered users of Android mobile phones and Apple’s iPhone access to more than 1.5 million public domain books for free.
For Google, further moves into online book distribution seem inevitable. “We are actively exploring ways to give authors and publishers more ways to sell books,” Google’s spokesperson commented, adding that the company had nothing specific to announce at this time.
The move could also help Sony in its competition with the Amazon Kindle 2. The Kindle has garnered widespread attention in recent weeks both to the release of the new Kindle II model and a patent battle with the owners of the Discovery Channel.
In the face of what Apple and Amazon have accomplished to date as digital content merchants, Sony might do well to develop its relationship with Google further.