SAN FRANCISCO — Aiming to outdo(胜过) Amazon.com and recapture the crown for the most digital titles in an e-book library, Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the Amazon Kindle.
Since 2004, Google has scanned(扫描) about seven million books from major university and research library collections. For now, however, Google can make full digital copies available only of books whose copyrights have expired(过期).
The books available to Reader owners were written before 1923 and include classics like “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” by Mark Twain, and “The Awakening,” by Kate Chopin, as well as harder-to-find titles like “The Letters of Jane Austen.”
“We have focused our efforts on offering an open platform and making it easy to find as much content as possible, and our partnership with Google is another step in that direction,” said Steve Haber, president of the digital reading business division of Sony Electronics. “We would love to continue working with Google to see how we can get more content for Reader owners.”
The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
Sony is hoping that the partnership and its newly expanded library help slow some of the Kindle’s momentum(势头). Amazon currently has 250,000 books in its Kindle library, but it stresses that they are the books people are most interested in reading, like new releases and best sellers.
Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, has said that works in the public domain, like those Google is making available to Sony, are easy to get since there are no copyrights attached.
Google has been working to encode books in a free, open electronic publishing format, ePub, which makes them easier to read on devices like the Reader. The company is aiming to gradually increase the number of copyright-free books in the Google Book Search catalog available to Sony and any other e-book distributor that shares its goals of making books more accessible.
Google is displaying only short snippets(片段，摘要) on its Web site of books that remain under copyright protection, which are the vast majority of the books it has scanned. Under a sweeping settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, which has yet to be approved by a judge, Google would have more freedom to sell copies and split the proceeds(收益) with rights holders.