Sony partners with Google to offer ebooks

Google and Sony are expected to announce a non-exclusive digital books partnership today, a move that goes directly at Amazon and its new Kindle reader. With the Sony reader, there are still titles available for purchase online. But the Google catalog boosts Sony’s offerings by adding the more than 500,000 public domain books scanned by Google as part of its controversial book digitization project. Those titles will be made available for free. The move, announced today, dwarfs the roughly 245,000 closed-format titles currently available for the much-hyped Amazon Kindle.