More than half a million classic books by such authors as Mark Twain and Jane Austen will now be available free for digital book readers thanks to a partnership between Google and Sony announced this week.
According to published reports, Sony Electronics Inc. will offer users of its e-book reading devices more than 500,000 public domain books from Google Inc. via Sony's eBook Store.
The venture increases the number of titles at Sony's store to more than 600,000, far surpassing the library of its competitor, Amazon.com's Kindle, which reportedly has about 250,000 titles.
The titles, all published before 1923, include Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and Herodotus' "The Histories."
Sony's Reader Digital Books start at about $300.
