Sony's digital book store just got a million titles fatter, thanks to the addition of Google Books' public domain library.
The selections are all out-of-copyright and presumably free to download, though a report by Reuters doesn't say that specifically. Sony gains from this agreement through bragging rights; it can now say that its e-Reader has the largest selection of electronic books on the market. Amazon's Kindle store offers 300,000 titles.
It's worth noting that Barnes & Noble, which launched a digital book store last week, also makes use of Google Books, but its library is only 700,000 books strong. Still, that means there's room for expansion, and it also shows that any e-book provider can boost its numbers by tapping into the public domain.
Titles in Google's public domain library include literary legends such as Dante's Inferno, Aesop's Fables and Hamlet by Shakespeare. You can read them through a computer too, of course, but an e-Reader makes the experience more relaxing.
Still, Reuters says issues prevent the e-reader from becoming a widely-adopted gadget, especially the closed nature of each store. If you buy a book through the Kindle store, for instance, it won't work on Sony's e-Reader. The readers are also expensive, with the basic Kindle selling for $300 and Sony's e-Readers priced at either $300 or $350.
I also think, especially at those prices, that e-Readers pose a dilemma, because you basically have to commit to electronic books to make such a large purchase worthwhile. That means abandoning the physical library, which, let's face it, is alluring no matter how big e-bookstores get.
