Thread: Sony Partners With Google To Bring More Than 500,000 Books To The Reader
View Single Post
Old 03-20-2009, 01:43 PM   #123
Elfwreck
Grand Sorcerer
Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Elfwreck's Avatar
 
Posts: 5,187
Karma: 25133758
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3 (Past: Kobo Mini, PEZ, PRS-505, Clié)
Quote:
Originally Posted by CommanderROR View Post
I hope google will eventually do away with this whole regional stuff...and not just google. It really can't be that an international system likte the internet gets artificial boundaries built into it...
I suspect it's related to copyright issues--they had to fight to get the right to show pages online; making them easily downloadable as ePubs is going to be a big no-no for copyrighted books.

And they may not have a way to filter "books that are copyrighted in the country of the downloader," so they only have books that are PD in the USA. (The majority of these are PD everywhere, but not all--in the USA, everything before 1923 is public domain, but if the author was young in 1920, and lived another 50 years, those books aren't PD in many other countries.) And in order to stay compliant with other countries' copyright laws, they just say "this is attached to software that (supposedly) only works in the US."
Elfwreck is offline   Reply With Quote