Sony is tapping into Google's massive book-scanning project as it battles with Amazon.com over the emerging digital book market. Sony, which has an electronic reader that competes with Amazon's Kindle, said today it's now offering more than a million free public domain books from Google. Barnes & Noble has also teamed with Google on e-books. Will Amazon join forces with the search giant? For now, at least, it doesn't seem likely.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at a recent event pointedly criticized Google's book settlement with authors and publishers, saying "it doesn't seem right that you should get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights." And Google has made noises about letting publishers sell new-release books through its website, which would be a big threat to Amazon's Kindle business.
But Amazon isn't entirely averse to cooperating with Google, at least indirectly. Amazon is now doing on-demand reprints of out-of-copyright books from the University of Michigan library -- and some of 400,000 titles were digitized by Google as part of its book-scanning project (The fact that Amazon is only working with out-of-copyright books is significant, given Bezos' comments and continuing controversy over Google's work with so-called "orphan books" whose rights holders can't be found).
While Sony and Barnes & Noble presumably won't derive any revenue from the free Google books, they can now boast a much longer list of available titles. I can't find the total number of titles in the Sony eBook Store, but it now includes the million books from Google. Barnes & Noble offers more than 700,000 titles (500,000 from Google). By contrast, Amazon's Kindle store is at 300,000 titles.
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