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Old 06-04-2009, 09:09 PM   #1
epubreader
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Can't find 500,000 free books at Sony; can you?

Sony says they have 500,000 free ebooks from Google.

But when I do a search of inauthor:John using the Sony ebook library software I only find 171 free books.

The exact same search at Google finds 78,309 free books (or 1,480,214 total books).

Since Google has about 1.5 million free books that suggests that Sony has less than 10,000 free books -- not 500,000.

Could someone please be so kind as to let me know what I'm not understanding. Surely Sony and Google are not lying to us.

Last edited by epubreader; 06-04-2009 at 09:12 PM.
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Old 06-05-2009, 12:19 AM   #2
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You have to click on the unearth a classic box and search there.
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Old 06-05-2009, 12:23 AM   #3
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epubreader, welcome to MobileRead.

As you can see, we have friendly helpful people here.

Why not introduce yourself here, and let us know where you are from, and what you like to read? Just start a new thread.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=49

There are many (thousands) free books here, lovingly handformatted by our own members, and ready for your sony.

Enjoy the forums.
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Old 06-05-2009, 01:36 AM   #4
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Welecome epubreader!

Hmm, I'm not sure. There are geographic restrictions on Google Books, so here in the UK we get far fewer ebooks than are available in the US.
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Old 06-05-2009, 03:10 AM   #5
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I'm not allowed to buy books from the Sony Store, being a benighted un-person (i.e., I don't live in North America).

And not only did my Reader cost me about twice as much as it did in America, but also the 100 free ebooks on offer weren't available to me.

Bit of a bugger, really...
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Old 06-05-2009, 04:00 AM   #6
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I bought my reader when that promotion was going on, and I don't even think I downloaded any of the free classics from the Sony site. I downloaded a few classics from this website, and still plan to download more eventually. So, just because you can't use the sony site, you're really not missing out on the classics. This website has all the same books the Sony website did plus more.
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Old 06-05-2009, 09:49 AM   #7
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Originally Posted by toomanybooks View Post
You have to click on the unearth a classic box and search there.
That's where I am searching. But I'm not in the U.S. so maybe 99% of the books are blocked.

Do you get tens of thousands of search results for a search of inauthor:john ? Or a couple of hundred like I do?
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Old 06-05-2009, 11:52 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by epubreader View Post
Do you get tens of thousands of search results for a search of inauthor:john ? Or a couple of hundred like I do?
Three hundred and something... It's a bit odd though, as a search for "The" returned 599 results, while searching for "e" came back with fewer - 568!
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Old 06-05-2009, 11:57 AM   #9
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I can't test because my Sony software is broken and I don't know how to fix it. I've just given up on their store and library system. I have enough buggy software in my life already.
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Old 06-05-2009, 01:02 PM   #10
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Three hundred and something... It's a bit odd though, as a search for "The" returned 599 results.
OK. So you are seeing the same problem I am.

If Sony had 500,000 free books like they claim, then a search of inauthor:John would return more than 25,000 books.

And a search for "The" would return more than 100,000 books since that search at books.google.com returns almost 400,000 free downloadable books.

Do you think their search box isn't working and nobody noticed?
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Old 06-05-2009, 01:45 PM   #11
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I don't think we can assume that the search engine works as we think it should. I'm not saying I know how it works, just that I'm familiar with other search engines and they never do quite what you expect.

The 500,000 free Google books are different from the Classics that were offered up in the 100 Free Classics promotion. The Google books include a lot of phenomenal old research books that are long out of print; the Classics are mostly fiction.
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Old 06-06-2009, 04:30 PM   #12
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I can't test because my Sony software is broken and I don't know how to fix it. I've just given up on their store and library system. I have enough buggy software in my life already.
Check out http://calibre[DOT]kovidgoyal[DOT]net if you haven't already, toomanybooks. It's a great ebook format converter that works on Vista, and it also works as a good library program. You can download original book cover art (many ebooks don't have it) and edit metatags, sort options, etc, etc.

It has a tendency to fall over if you're editing your entire collection en masse, but it's still miles better than Sony ReaderCONNECT.
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Old 06-06-2009, 05:11 PM   #13
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Here I thought it was just me! I downloaded the Sony Library which allows you to read books on the PC (not that I want too) and wanted to download a couple just to get the feel of it. I haven't bought a new Reader yet (that's why I'm here!). I have a Palm TX but a Vista 64 bit. Not a good combination!
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