Google Partners With COOLERBOOKS — Enters e-Book Game Directly
Google has been skirting around the e-book world for years, starting with the book scanning project a while back. That project was not without controversy, and its fruits recently formed a partnership with Sony to provide a million books to the Sony e-book store. Now comes word that Google has partnered with British e-book retailer COOLERBOOKS to enter the game directly.
COOLERBOOKS is the online store for British company Interead, and they already have a line of e-book readers for $249. The partnership gives Google a ready market, particularly outside the U.S. The COOL-ER reader looks to be a decent device, and according to the web site over 750,000 titles are available on the COOLERBOOKS site. Owners of the reader get a 25% discount on e-book purchases.
Google has the clout to give Amazon and Barnes & Noble a run for their e-book money. Game on.
I downloaded some of the Google books that are available through the Sony website. Worthless – loaded with typos and formatting errors, I would think twice before leaning on them as content provider. If I’m looking for older, public-domain titles, I tend to visit manybooks.net or mobileread – both have piles of reasonably well formatted titles in Sony BBeB, epub, mobi, etc. (Some are even in ereader format, which is my preferred choice)