Predictably, Sony has also cut the prices on their ebook readers following similar moves by Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. In a nutshell:
Sony announced today that they have, with Google’s contribution, added over half a million (500,000) free public domain books to their library for their eReaders. This collection consist of books whose copyright has expired, so most of these titles will have been published prior to 1932.
This brings the total number of titles in the Sony eBook Store to over 600,000 easily surpassing the 250,000 titles that the Kindle Store has.
While many see this as Google teaming up with Sony to compete with Amazon in the eReader field, I think Google probably saw this as an easy decision, choosing to go with the vendor that supported the e-book standard, EPUB. Kindle does not natively support EPUB, although it has a conversion tool that ships with the reader.
