any buy book from google yet?

[oncdoc]

did it work? i have 650

[DrScotter]

Originally Posted by oncdoc

did it work? i have 650

After signing into The Sony Store from the Sony Reader Library software I clicked on the home page of The Sony Store. Yesterday I was surprised to see a link for "Google Books" in the left hand column under "Featured Links." From there I was able to download Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott. It downloaded to the Sony Reader Library Software and then to my PRS-650 with no problem.

[DrScotter]

Btw, the googlebooks appear to be photocopied versions. You can see handwritten notes by previous readers but it transfers to the PRS-650 with little problem.

It says this after the cover:
"This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world's books discoverable online. See the back of the book for detailed information."

It does appear to be a scan from an original printing from 1885. The Table Of Contents function on the Sony Reader appears intact. The dictionary and all other functions found on other books seems to work like it should.

And here's the info from the back of the book explaining about Google Books:

"About this Book - From Google

This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library
shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make
the world's books discoverable online. It has survived long enough for the
copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain
book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term
has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to
country. Public domain books are our gateways to the past, representing a
wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover.
Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume may appear
in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the publisher to a
library and finally to you.



Google Book Search has digitized millions of physical books and made them
available online at http://books.google.com
. The digitization at the most basic level is based on page images of the
physical books. To make this book available as an ePub formated file we have
taken those page images and extracted the text using Optical Character
Recognition (or OCR for short) technology. The extraction of text from page
images is a difficult engineering task. Smudges on the physical books' pages,
fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the
extracted text. Imperfect OCR is only the first challenge in the ultimate goal
of moving from collections of page images to extracted-text based books. Our
computer algorithms also have to automatically determine the structure of the
book (what are the headers and footers, where images are placed, whether text
is verse or prose, and so forth). Getting this right allows us to render the
book in a way that follows the format of the original book.



Despite our best efforts you may see spelling mistakes, garbage characters,
extraneous images, or missing pages in this book. Based on our estimates, these
errors should not prevent you from enjoying the content of the book. The
technical challenges of automatically constructing a perfect book are daunting,
but we continue to make enhancements to our OCR and book structure extraction
technologies.



We hope you'll enjoy these books as much as we do.


Usage guidelines


Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain
materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong
to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this
work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we
have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including
placing technical restrictions on automated querying.



We also ask that you:


Make non-commercial use of the files: We designed Google Book
Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files
for personal, non-commercial purposes.


Refrain from automated querying: Do not send automated queries
of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on
machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas
where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact
us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes
and may be able to help.


Maintain attribution: The Google "watermark" you see on
each file is essential for informing people about this project and
helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search.
Please do not remove it.


Keep it legal: Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible
for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that
just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in
the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for
users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies
from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any
specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume
that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used
in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability
can be quite severe.



About Google Book Search


Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make
it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers
discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach
new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on
the web at http"

[jashsu]

I think the OP was asking about paid books on the ebookstore, not the public domain scanned content.

[ZombieEatsYou]

I've bought three. no problems noted.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by ZombieEatsYou

I've bought three. no problems noted.

I have seen others complain about formatting and some books are terrible OCR scans. Would you say the books you bought are comparable to Sony, Kobo or other common stores? So far I've held back from any Google purchases because there hasn't been any advantage to them. I do like to use their free books through the Sony store.

[jashsu]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I have seen others complain about formatting and some books are terrible OCR scans. Would you say the books you bought are comparable to Sony, Kobo or other common stores? So far I've held back from any Google purchases because there hasn't been any advantage to them. I do like to use their free books through the Sony store.

The problem is that some books are OCR scans and others are not. If in doubt, open up the preview and examine the text. Generally speaking if you see publisher data (and even a publication date) then it is most likely not an OCR. Note that even texts delivered in digital format to Google from the publisher may contain OCR-ish typos. Bad proofing/editing I suppose.

[inkyness]

I haven't bought anything from Google yet, but I did notice that some of the free classics were of in a somewhat disappointing quality. I also noticed that a couple major books (for example, "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss) are available on other major bookstores but not on Google.

I also noticed that a fair number of books I was interested in said "No download files included," meaning you couldn't get an epub file to read on an ereader.

[ZombieEatsYou]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I have seen others complain about formatting and some books are terrible OCR scans. Would you say the books you bought are comparable to Sony, Kobo or other common stores? So far I've held back from any Google purchases because there hasn't been any advantage to them. I do like to use their free books through the Sony store.

The free "classics" are indeed mostly ocr scans and I do run into ocr goofs with those. The ones I bought, "Field guide to the apocolypse" and "Apocolypse of the Dead" are comparable quality to any other book I've gotten from sony.