Showing posts with label copyright-free books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copyright-free books. Show all posts

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Sony Reaches Deal to Share in Google’s E-Book Library , The New York Times, 3/18/09

Via The New York Times: Sony Reaches Deal to Share in Google’s E-Book Library:

"Aiming to outdo Amazon.com and recapture the crown for the most digital titles in an e-book library, Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the Amazon Kindle.

Since 2004, Google has scanned about seven million books from major university and research library collections. For now, however, Google can make full digital copies available only of books whose copyrights have expired...

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, has said that works in the public domain, like those Google is making available to Sony, are easy to get since there are no copyrights attached.

Google has been working to encode books in a free, open electronic publishing format, ePub, which makes them easier to read on devices like the Reader. The company is aiming to gradually increase the number of copyright-free books in the Google Book Search catalog available to Sony and any other e-book distributor that shares its goals of making books more accessible."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/technology/19sony.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=copyright&st=cse