Looks like Sony has made a tense trade agreement with Google in order to keep up with Amazon. Google is letting Sony use 50,000 public domain books that it has scanned. Sony will make these books available for free on its eReader.

If Sony paid Google ANYTHING for this, Sony got swindled.



I'm sure they paid millions. Are we ready to nationalize Google yet before they start selling us our own emails and the drawings of trees we did in kindergarten that Nanna scanned for Paw-Paw's birthday?

Unfortunately for Sony, all of Google's public domain titles are also available on the Kindle, if you hack the Kindle to let it read other ebooks besides Amazon's proprietary format, which is trivially easy to do.

You can also read all of Sony's books for free on your computer using Calibre.

Of course, now that Sony and Google have a "business relationship," Google can start selling Sony all those out-of-print books they stole last year. And then Google can sell them to Apple. And then Amazon!

And then Google can buy them all. Maybe it will merge them for awhile, just for kicks. Sonazapple.

And then it will delete them.

Posted by miracle on Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:20:13 -0400 -- permanent link