Sony's eBook Gets 500,000 Books from Google. Good But Not Good Enough

Posted on Mar 19, 09 10:23 AM PDT

There is a slight rebound in Sony's eBook fortunes: Google has made 500,000 eBooks (that are unprotected by copyrights) available for free (!) on the Sony eBook Reader. That might be enough to give Sony bragging rights on the "biggest library" and there's no denying that "free" is hard to beat. However, the book will also be available on the Kindle as PDFs - for free too. So, while this is great for Sony, this is not really an incentive to shy away from the Kindle 2, which costs only $60 more than the Sony Reader, but features free internet access to Wikipedia and access to more recent books and magazines.

Sony could do a comeback if it were to build a great eBook manager, an "iTunes for eBooks", if you will. Amazon could also make things better in that respect. At the moment, Apple seems largely uninterested, but if that market was picking up, they could probably hurt both Amazon and Sony very quickly, thanks to their delivery platform.

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