By on March 19, 2009

Classic Battle for eBook Reader Market

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While Amazon makes the big splash with Kindle 2 and fends off potential lawsuit regarding its technology, sony-ereaderSony has cut a deal with Google that is a classic.

As reported at cnet, in a partnership with Sony, Google will provide over 500,000 titles whose copyrights have expired which include literary classics like “Sense and Sensibility” and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. This move takes the number of titles to that the Sony offering has to 600,000 vs. the 250,000 for the Amazon offering. These include German, French, Spanish, Italian and other language translations as well.

Of course, if you don’t care about the classics then this is a moot point. In this economy though it’s hard to beat the fact that users will now be able to access the free book downloads through Sony’s eBook Store. I know these are all titles that were written prior to 1923 for the most part but a good book is a good book regardless of when it was written. Maybe studying the classics would be helpful to a nation that has spent more time looking over the past 80 plus years of economic activity more than ever before. Maybe looking back is a good way to move forward. I don’t know but for many it beats trekking to the library to get a beat up copy of these books that has been dog eared and written in over the past 20 years.

Google is taking advantage of all the work it has done with its Google book search project. While the books are free to the Sony Reader users there is little doubt that Sony ponied up a fair amount of cash for the opportunity although the details have not been disclosed.

I have not made the e Book switch yet and I am not sure I will. There are a lot of folks out there that really enjoy this option and apparently the big players are raising the stakes. Should be interesting to track.


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9 comments on “Classic Battle for eBook Reader Market”

  1. Blake Griffin Says:

    March 19th, 2009 at 9:12 am

    This is an informative post. I personally have not read many ebooks, but have been thinking about it lately. There seems to be a lot of people dealing in ebooks these days, so I am not surprised at their popularity.

    Blake Griffin’s last blog post..The Top Three Content Management Systems

  2. beleza Says:

    March 19th, 2009 at 10:08 am

    Hi, i’m my opinion the e-books are very important because its information that you usually can not find in book stores and you save time and money. I think that is a big popularity because of that.

    beleza’s last blog post..A magia da Massagem de Pedras Quentes

  3. Bo Tipton Says:

    March 19th, 2009 at 10:54 am

    As a avid reader I use a Sony ebook reader and it is much easier to carry around what I would need a wheelbarrow for if it was printed versions. I also like to read the classics so this is a good deal.

    Thanks
    Bo Tipton
    The Ornery Marketer

    Bo Tipton’s last blog post..Can I Make Money In The Next Thirty Days

  4. alphabet55 Says:

    March 20th, 2009 at 11:58 am

    For me, this means nothing. There are many websites which have public domain works for the kindle. The only difference being that you don’t use the kindle store, you download them and put them on yourself.

    A ton of information can be found here: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=147

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  9. Cheryl Says:

    March 23rd, 2009 at 12:44 pm

    Okay so I’m thinking — so what. Most classics are on sites for free and can be downloaded or emailed to a Kindle via Feedbooks.com, Gutenberg.org and yes even Google Books, to name just a few, of many. I’ve used them all to download books to my PC or email to my Kindle. Which actually begs the question – Sony, what took you so long?