Sony has announced that, through the medium of Google Books, it’s offering over a million books for free in what’s hard to see as anything but a direct assault on Amazon’s Kindle.
Sony’s e-book readers have always had a bit of an edge over the Kindle in the looks department and its latest move to include more than a million books puts it streets ahead of the competition in terms of the sheer amount of content users have access to. At this stage, the fact that Sony now offers so many public domain books available might well be the straw that breaks the Kindle’s back.
We can’t imagine Amazon is too impressed with this announcement coming, as it does, so soon after its Big Brother moment, during which (for legal reasons) it deleted both 1984 and Animal Farm from users’ devices without informing them it was doing so beforehand.
For now, suffice it to say that the offer of public domain books for free on a portable reader is something practically without competition (unless you count the iPhone’s Stanza, which is truly very impressive).
You can read more about the Sony Reader and the Google Books deal, here.
Tags: amazon, books, drm, ebooks, free, kindle, reader, sony
