Google is going to make the books it has scanned for its Google Book Search project available.
Unfortunately for Kindle fans, it is making them available to Sony. And the full books being provided are only those whose copyrights have expired, meaning nothing published after 1923.
Still, a step in the right direction, or a half-million of them, to be precise. (Except for the looming infestations of endless copies of A Tale of Two Cities, of course. Don't ask.) And it's certainly a good thing to keep challenging Amazon's dominance and to keep putting pressure on them to open up their platform.
Most articles I've looked at haven't said anything about the price to end users, although a post on Wired and another on LATimes.com say they'll be free to download. (Maybe the rest of them thought it was too obvious to need saying?)
Anyway, yay.
(h/t: Buzz Out Loud)
P.S. BTW, the Wired post says these books are already available for free download, as PDF files. And look, yeah: here is Tom Sawyer, here is Connecticut Yankee, here is Huck Finn (with Tom Sawyer -- I don't see any standalone full free ones).
3 comments:
So, just out of curiosity, what are the other good reasons to buy one?
(My counter-proposal still stands: give me one with my agreement to buy ten books at $7.99 within two years. Solve your stupid greedhead format wars now; I'm not buying any more Betamaxes. And the first person I see in traffic with one propped up on a steering wheel I shoot to kill.)
So, just out of curiosity, what are the other good reasons to buy one?
Heh. I may just be an aging kid, still unduly fascinated with toys, but I want one. Something about the idea of having an entire library in that little amount of space is really appealing.
Your idea of a free reader in return for a minimum number of purchases is a good one, and I've read and heard others asking for this option, too. I expect it will come, eventually, once the early adopters have all already bought. As I've noted elsewhere, though, I'd be happy to pay for the unit if they could figure out some way to "rent" books. There are so many books I'm pretty sure I'd only want to read once, or even more to the point, would like to sample before paying for.
You are absolutely right about the format wars, though. That's as much of a stopper for me right now as is the purchase price.
And, have you ever shot at a person with a dead-tree book propped up on the steering wheel? I have actually seen this behavior, but I was out of bullets at the time.
More from John Rogers, who owns one.
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