Google and Sony team up to provide half-million books for free!

To? combat the growing market share of Kindle 2.0, Amazon’s answer to Sony’s E-Book reader Google and Sony have joined forces to offer 5,00,000 books for free through Sony’s bookstore.

Google Books has already scanned all the public domain book?and makes it available for full-viewing as well as PDF downloads. And now it plans to checkmate the online retailing giant while boosting the size of Sony books to 6,00,00 – 5 times more than it currently has!

Google will make these available as EPUB downloads which will make it easier to adapt the ebooks to different screen sizes.

Sony Reader has 2 versions and they compete directly with Kindle which is sleeker than Sony’s Reader. But the design of Sony Reader is better than that of Kindle. While Kindle offers 2,45,ooo best-selling titles for Kindle for $9.99, Sony users will be able to get the public domain books for free – and there are many many classics in public domain which include books from Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and many more!

The books can be accessed online at http://books.google.com

image courtesy: Ian Wilson