NEW YORK - Google Inc. is making half a million books, unprotected by copyright, available for free on Sony Corp.'s electronic book-reading device, the companies were set to announce Thursday....
The scanned books were all published before 1923, and include works like Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" as well as nonfiction classics like Herodotus' "The Histories."
[From Yahoo! News - Sony e-book reader gets 500,000 books from Google by AP: Yahoo! Tech ]
Sony is playing a numbers game here with Amazon - acquiring a 500,000 book library from Google gives Sony the bigger library for it's e-book reader, which competes with Amazon's Kindle.
Electronic book sales, while representing a very small percentage of the publishing industry, are accelerating upward as traditional sales languish. And if the proliferation of services offering free books is any indication, there is a corresponding surge of interest in older books not protected by copyright. And that includes a whole lot of good books.
I'm not opposed to copyright laws but my guess would be that in their present form they are about to become the same kind of drag on book publishing they have become in the world of music. And whether or not that's true, with a seemingly large number of readers today willing to read about sci-fi and fantasy worlds, why would they not be willing to explore the more immediate world of fiction as it existed before the 1920's?
Who knows. Maybe Dickens will hit the charts again. Or Mark Twain.
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