Sony Partners With Google To Bring More Than 500,000 Books To The Reader

[SteveK]

I just spent about an hour randomly selecting books to "preview". I didn't download any of them (yet), but I was able to get an idea how a few of their books look. I wasn't trying to read, I just wanted to do a random visual tour.

Overall, the feeling I get is of looking through a huge library of rare books, except that the pages don't fall apart when you touch them. Many of the books I previewed were published in the late 1800's, and some had obviously seen better days.Some of the typefaces were somewhat harder to read than books published today, but they're certainly not unreadable.

I very much enjoyed my browsing, and it's a certainty that I will be taking advantage of the Sony/Google offerings. I'm sure some of them will be a bit rough around the edges, but many of the books I previewed looked quite nice and had great illustrations. I think this will be a great feature, and makes me even happier with my Sony reader.

SteveK

[jimad]

Another option for Kindle users is from a Dos Box do a:

mobigen yourbook.epub

to generate:

yourbook.mobi

which can be read on a Kindle. Seems to lose the pictures, but works well enough on simple books. I haven't tried Calibre but I guess I need to go there! Thanks for the .zip hint, I will take a look at that one too.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by CommanderROR

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."

[billbirchall]

I know that I am being parochial but am I not right in thinking, that this is only open to the US and Canada. Sony continues to sell the Readers across the rest of the world but are they making sure that we get the same offers as the US? Does anyone have any idea when the UK might be included?

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by billbirchall

I know that I am being parochial but am I not right in thinking, that this is only open to the US and Canada. Sony continues to sell the Readers across the rest of the world but are they making sure that we get the same offers as the US? Does anyone have any idea when the UK might be included?

It's only available in the US becuase the offered books are in the PD in the US.

But that doesn't matter becuase you can still get the books. All you have to do is lie and say you are in the US.

[Studio717]

I wasn't complaining so much as asking for help since the Reader software end of things was less than stellar when I tried to locate and download two volumes from a series of ~20 (depending on the edition). Apparently, I'm the only one experiencing this.

Which is not to say I wouldn't love to have the pages I've needed that are unreadably blurry to be reshot.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

All you have to do is lie ....

(sigh) Whatever. Don't mind me.

EDIT: Crap! Look, don't mind me. Nate gave the right answer. I'm not complaining. It's a simple, meaningless flaw that someone set up to protect their legal butt so, please, just lie and go on. My sigh was just that we have to deal with these stupid flaws and through impersonal computers and we are all now encouraged to lie all the time. I find that really sad.

Move along. Move along.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by jimad

Another option for Kindle users is from a Dos Box do a:

mobigen yourbook.epub

to generate:

yourbook.mobi

which can be read on a Kindle. Seems to lose the pictures, but works well enough on simple books. I haven't tried Calibre but I guess I need to go there! Thanks for the .zip hint, I will take a look at that one too.

The best way to convert ePub to Mobipocket is via Calibre. Nothing does a better job right now.

[thibaulthalpern]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

But it's still a bunch of Public Domain books. Until Sony can up their contemporary content, I'm not sure the current balance of power is in jeopardy. Great for schools though.

Not really. I don't think it's that great for schools. A lot of the entries are, honestly, a bunch of crap. I looked through the anthropology list and can't believe they have things like society papers, old old old academic journals that no one refers to (perhaps except for historical research). I think a lot of what Google has digitised is a bunch of old crap that university libraries did not want to store any longer.

[Ervserver]

The content is subjective, while some are hootin n hollerin over this development others couldn't care less. I found a few reads for myself, anytime I can snag a free read I'm happy.

Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern

Not really. I don't think it's that great for schools. A lot of the entries are, honestly, a bunch of crap. I looked through the anthropology list and can't believe they have things like society papers, old old old academic journals that no one refers to (perhaps except for historical research). I think a lot of what Google has digitised is a bunch of old crap that university libraries did not want to store any longer.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Ervserver

The content is subjective, while some are hootin n hollerin over this development others couldn't care less. I found a few reads for myself, anytime I can snag a free read I'm happy.

I think that Google Books is the best thing since the proverbial sliced bread; it's absolutely revolutionised the ease of access to scans of old printed books for me, for the purpose of properly proof-reading my eBooks.

[shady]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

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."

When Google announced their wider book program (PDFs on the web), they announced that about a third of the books available in the US would be available in the UK, due to differences in the copyright laws (in the UK, books enter PD 70 years after the author's death; typographical copyright also exists for 25 years, so an edition of Shakespeare, without editorial comment, would have 25 years worth of typographical copyright).

Based on the above, Google do know which books are copyright in the UK and could flag which are PD in the UK. The issue is that Sony provides zero support to its UK users, since it doesn't have a store and outsources supply and content support to Waterstones, who treat it like a science project, and where ebooks are only 20% off the retail price of hard goods. So there's no place for Google to run an analogous program for UK users, since Sony doesn't care about them enough to run its own store there.

BTW, even more gallingly, the digitisation program was supported by UK public funds, through British educational and other cultural institutions engaged (which was disproportionate, since many of the largest libraries of older English books are in Britain).

As an aside, and if anyone hasn't looked recently, a whole slew of Penguin ebooks landed in the Waterstones store on 16 March - they're not visible in the Penguin store yet, but Penguin's commitment to the program is even more lackadaisical than Waterstones'. Notably the guy running the e-reader program at Penguin blogged late last year that he doesn't use an e-reader; no surprise there.

[mrmikel]

I am glad they did it. One of the offerings is Savrola, the only novel Winston Spencer Churchill ever wrote. It has been all but impossible to find and I am curious about it, since I am fond of his other words. Now I have downloaded and will get a chance to read it and perhaps see how things in his life affected it.

As for there being nothing there, much of John Buchan is there, and that is worthwhile (although it is available here and on feedbooks.) There have been some works of Buchan's which have not been readily available and now they are available through this program.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

As for there being nothing there, much of John Buchan is there, and that is worthwhile (although it is available here and on feedbooks.) There have been some works of Buchan's which have not been readily available and now they are available through this program.

I used a Google Books scan of Buchan's "The 39 Steps" to proof and correct my eBook version of it. The PG version is in a very poor state.

[mrmikel]

One source for certain books is www.loc.gov, the US Library of Congress. If they have them online, the displayed copies are in excellent condition and exceedingly readable.

But they tend to be US topics.

I have had to try 3 different versions to get an full page and for one book, there simply was no map, even though it was listed, in any of the books.

But back to topic, Ian Hamilton's March, a Churchill book, is another one I was able to get, which was not available online otherwise, except as displayed in a later copyrighted work where I could not be sure what was Churchill's and what was the editors.