Google Shares half a Million Ebooks with Sony’s Ebook reader

The race to dominate the market for electronic books is beginning to gain momentum. Following the onset of the second version of the Amazon Kindle, Sony announced today the signing of an agreement with Google through which users can use the Sony Ebook Reader ( PRS-505 and PRS-700) and to consult books for free with over half a million titles available of nearly seven million of the search engine has been digitized since 2004.

The agreement between both companies, which no economic details have transcended, will allow Sony to offer some competition to his great rival, Amazon’s Kindle
. In fact, the owners of e-book from Amazon can now buy about 250,000 books in that shop online, The New York Times reports.

Amazon’s Kindle
, however, does not seem very worried. First, its digital library has fewer titles, yes, but today they have the best selling books catalog, they have Stephen King, Tom Clancy, etc.. And therefore are much easier to reach the public.

Among the books that Google has made available to users of the Sony Reader are public domain titles whose copyrights have expired, ie, published prior to 1929.

Google has proposed to digitize all the books that are edited and published in the world and has launched a multimillion dollar advertising campaign in the media of paper informing writers about their project.