Google Books adds open-standard downloads

For any­one using any kind of elec­tronic reader — includ­ing a reg­u­lar com­puter — this addi­tion to Google Books may well prove quite useful:

I’m excited to announce that start­ing today, Google Books will offer free down­loads of these and more than one mil­lion more pub­lic domain books in an addi­tional for­mat, EPUB. By adding sup­port for EPUB down­loads, we’re hop­ing to make these books more acces­si­ble by help­ing peo­ple around the world to find and read them in more places. More peo­ple are turn­ing to new read­ing devices to access dig­i­tal books, and many such phones, net­books, and e-ink read­ers have smaller screens that don’t read­ily ren­der image-based PDF ver­sions of the books we’ve scanned. EPUB is a light­weight text-based dig­i­tal book for­mat that allows the text to auto­mat­i­cally con­form (or “reflow”) to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open stan­dard sup­ported by a grow­ing ecosys­tem of dig­i­tal read­ing devices, works you down­load from Google Books as EPUBs won’t be tied to or locked into a par­tic­u­lar device.

via Inside Google Books: Download Over a Million Public Domain Books from Google Books in the Open EPUB Format.

This kind of access shows some of the poten­tial of the pub­lic domain to allow for inno­va­tion and reuse. Thank Google — and Google adver­tis­ers, of course — for mak­ing it free. (They could legally sell public-domain works — there is no legal require­ment that such access be free and open.)

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