You may recall that in March of this year, Sony struck a deal with Google to make half a million public domain books from its digitization project available as free downloads on the Sony Reader in its e-book store.
Wired.com told us that it was “a hefty blow to Amazon not only because it gives Sony a much larger e-book library than the Kindle store — more than 600,000 to Amazon’s roughly 245,000 — but also because Google’s books are in the open ePub format Amazon doesn’t support. On top of all that, Sony has also dropped the price of its PRS-700 to $350, slightly below the price of the Kindle.”
We know you love to read books that you can obtain with internet speed, which is why we told you about the Kindle from Amazon. But of course, there are now even more options to read books via the internet, which we’ll tell you about in another post.
Back in March, Google’s book digitization project had just been through a $125 million settlement in its lawsuit with the authors and publishers. Now, this past week, Sony, stated that they thought the settlement between Google and the authors and publishers “may have a profoundly positive impact on the market for e-book readers and related devices.”
Sony expressed its support for a settlement that lets Google and the rights holders share revenues from commercial use of the company’s vast online database of digitized books.
Under the settlement, Google would be able to sell access to millions of books online, as well as offer for-pay subscriptions that would allow libraries, universities and other institutions unfettered access to the Google Books collection. Google would pay rights holders 67% of the revenues generated from the database.
Tags: Digital Books, Internet Speed