Comments on: 500,000 public domain titles in ePub, from Google-Sony partnership. Readable on a PC—no Sony Reader needed.

By: RE Mant

RE Mant — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:37:02 +0000

At this juncture I can get no Google books returned from a search. Have they backed out of this deal?

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:52:10 +0000

I don’t own a Sony right now. I just downloaded the program on my Vista-OS PC. David

By: Dmitri Minaev

Dmitri Minaev — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:28:45 +0000

I’ve installed that piece of software from Sony on a virtual machine, but it just doesn’t start. Is it possible to run it without Sony Reader?

By: Cat Faber

Cat Faber — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:37:40 +0000

I’m happy for Sony users who are also PC owners. I think it’s a nice step forward for ePub also.

Sony’s support for the Mac and said that a Mac version of the store would be forthcoming,

Well, that would be a big change. As a Mac owner myself, I had the impression that as far as Sony was concerned, we were so much chopped liver.

If that were to change, I’d be happy, even though I’ve gone with Kindle and am no longer interested in Sony myself. It would be great if other Mac users were to be able to give Sony serious consideration.

By: Greg M.

Greg M. — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:18:52 +0000

I haven’t looked at the titles available, but are they that much better than, say, Project Gutenburg, Manybooks, Munsuys, et al? 500,000 public domain books aren’t going to win anybody over.

By: Hadrien Gardeur

Hadrien Gardeur — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:07:20 +0000

500k titles sure, but most of them are full of OCR errors and I wonder how they handle complex book structures or any sort of formatting.

It’s nice to see ePub support on both Project Gutenberg and Google Books, but there’s a long road ahead of them if they’d like to produce good looking e-books.

By: Court

Court — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:02:52 +0000

A shot across Amazon’s bow. How will they respond, I wonder.