Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:29:13 GMT

Sony Reader Gets 500,000 Free Public Domain Titles from Google.

Google made a practical move with some of the 7 million books it’s scanned from academic collections by making 500,000 titles with no remaining copyright protection available to Sony for its electronic book device, the Reader. Reports indicate only books from 1922 or earlier were included, as 1922 is the latest date for which public domain status is entirely clear. (Many works published after 1922 are also in the public domain, but each work has to be researched individually to determine its status.)

Earlier this year, Google added an option to view but not download 2 million public domain books on the iPhone; see “More Ebooks Available for the iPhone/iPod touch,” 2009-02-09. Think of it like iTunes song purchases versus a Pandora stream.

Google’s program to scan books ran afoul of publishers and authors’ concerns about the right to scan and archive titles, and the legality of snippets being displayed from these scanned works. A preliminary settlement between Google and various interested parties should make millions of books available for viewing, printing, download, and purchase in the coming months; these titles could also wind up being previewable and for sale on the Reader. (See “Authors and Publishers Settle with Google Book Search,” 2008-10-29.)

It’s clear that Google has chosen a side (for now) between the two giants of electronic book readers, Sony and Amazon. The Wall Street Journal notes Sony said its Reader sales are at 400,000 and reported that Citigroup estimated Amazon Kindle sales at 500,000.

The Kindle 2, introduced in February, improves on the design of the original device and has a faster screen refresh. Amazon released Kindle for iPhone shortly after the Kindle 2 hardware. Amazon offers 245,000 books for sale along with subscriptions to dozens of magazines and newspapers, and hundreds of blogs. The iPhone software can download only books, not subscriptions. That may change with Apple’s iPhone 3.0 software, which now enables in-application subscriptions and purchases.

Lest we forget, Project Gutenberg‘s volunteers have been assiduously typing, scanning, and correcting out-of-copyright works for many years. Its catalog, now at 27,000 books, includes downloads in text and other formats, including a DRM-free ePub format that both the Reader and Kindle 2 can handle. Affiliated and partner projects bring a grand total to 100,000 titles.

While Project Gutenberg has a fraction of what Google has made available, the quality should be higher, as works have been prepared for accuracy instead of volume, and represent works of a great likelihood to be interesting to a modern audience instead of historians and researchers.

Copyright © 2009 Glenn Fleishman. TidBITS is copyright © 2009 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you’re reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

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By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman). [TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us]