Sony and Google have announced a deal that will make Google's 500,000 public domain e-books available to Sony and its electronic readers, the PRS-700 and the PRS-505.
This partnership comes at a time when Sony and Amazon are dueling for dominance in the new electronic book reader industry.
This is big news for Sony users as it bumps up their library catalog to nearly 600,000 titles, far more than the 250,000 that Amazon has available. The Google e-books are a part of the public domain, meaning they are freely available to anyone who wants to read them. All of the titles which are available through Google were published before 1923 and include works of fiction and non-fiction in several different languages.
Up until now though these books could only be read on a computer screen which as most of us can attest to causes strain on the eyes after long periods. In contrast, electronic readers use a new technology called e-ink which creates "virtual paper" giving users a reading quality in line with traditional paper.
