Sony + Google Books: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
As you might have heard from one of many sources, Google Books has partnered with Sony’s eBook Store to make half a million out-of-copyright books available as non-DRMed ePubs.
This is unquestionably a step forward for the world of ereading, but for people who want to pick up one of these books right now, there are some caveats.
Here’s what going on with this partnership, and what it means for readers.
THE GOOD
No DRM: Before this deal with Google, Sony offered 100 free classic ebooks to Reader owners, and crippled even those free books with digital restriction measures. The Google books don’t have DRM, which hopefully heralds the first step toward doing away with DRM on books entirely.
Normal file names: A DRM-crippled book from Sony appears on your hard drive with a file name like “cbusceccl000b60p.lrx,” which is unhelpful for managing your own files on your own hard drive. The Google versions have (more) logical file names like “An_Ideal_Husband-p9yg3cc0F_0C.epub.” not entirely ideal, but better than before.
Use of ePub: This is a great boost to a nascent contender for a universal format, and it’s a relatively selfless step for Sony. It means that you can play them on non-Sony devices like the BeBook, or even your iPhone with Stanza (this guide helps). Great news.
Formatting: One of my big problems with Google Books was that the copies it made available for distribution were enormous, unwieldy image PDFs. For this project, they converted all the pages of text into actual text, which is a step forward. They even left the first few pages as images, so you can see the original table of contents, which is kind of neat. However, it’s nowhere near perfect yet (see THE UGLY, below).
Competition for Amazon: Amazon is the worst ereading criminal when it comes to proprietary content restrictions which are good for their company and bad for their customers. To encourage them to begin letting up on those restrictions, they need some content competition, which Sony has given them in one fell swoop.
THE BAD
Windows only: Sorry, Macheads. There’s no reason for this restriction.
Must use Sony’s eBook Library software: To get these ebooks, you have to first download Sony’s eBook Library software, which I hate. You have go to Sony’s online store through their software and find the Google Books icon above, which Sony hides below the fold and only includes on the main eBook Store page. Plus, my copy of eBook Library doesn’t even work with my reader anymore, so I have to find each book on my hard drive and load it manually with Calibre. Pain.
The fact that Sony’s involved: Sony offers nothing to the process of readers getting books, except the competition to Amazon mentioned above, and a bunch of useless middle steps. It’s good that a corporation’s getting involved with non-DRM, non-proprietary books, but, practically, it would be better for us readers if Sony wasn’t involved.
Google’s suspicious usage guidelines: In the “Usage guidelines” before each book, Google says, “we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.” This is instantly hackle-raising; it sounds like Google’s saying that by digitizing these books, they are the only ones allowed to profit off the digital copies, which doesn’t sit right. Also, where’s the line between personal and commercial use? Is a professor teaching a class using a book for commercial use? More on this at TeleRead.
THE UGLY
The books themselves: I was a little worried about how Google’s ePubs would display irregular forms, like plays and poems. It turns out, I got a little ahead of myself: the very text itself is riddled with extra characters and corrupted letters—you can see a picture below of Huck Finn; not all are as bad as this, but I haven’t found a book that didn’t have at least a few errors per page.
In their opening disclaimer in each book, Google says:
Despite our best efforts you may see spelling mistakes, garbage characters, extraneous images, or missing pages in this book. Based on our estimates, these errors should not prevent you from enjoying the content of the book.
Maybe they’re right, maybe you can read past “tKe” when you know it should be “the” or “CHAPTER HI” when it should be “CHAPTER III.”
But on another level, this is inexcusable. In the transition to digital books, we should settle for nothing less than perfect copies: we cannot lose anything.
Presumably, Google’s Optical Character Recognition (reading robots) will get better with time, but until then, keep getting your Twains from Manybooks.net.
[Below: A page from Huck Finn: it's "Chapter III," none of those slashes or consummate Vs should be in there, and I have no idea what that first word is.]
Dear Mac Users (and everyone else),
This is good news indeed, but you can get these books in most formats through manybooks.net quite easily (pdf and mobi look best on Stanza). And iPhone/iPod users: Stanza is very easy to use, even if that how-to seems daunting: Download the Stanza application, pick your book file, select Open With ->Stanza, then while it’s open on your computer you can upload the file to your device via the Shared Books section of the Stanza app. Easy as pie.
Well, not all of them. That’s the advantage of Google Books: they can digitize more books faster, and they have a bigger library.
Project Gutenberg—which is where Manybooks gets most of its books—has better, cleaner copies; Google has more books.
Try Manybooks first, and this Sony/Google thing only if necessary.