Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: Sony, Google Gang Up on Kindle

Written by Erin Barker

Thursday, March 19. 2009 at 11:15 AM EDT Post a comment

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Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE) have teamed up to make about a half million of Google's e-book titles available on the Sony Reader for free.

Prior to this deal, Sony's library contained about 100,000 titles, compared to the Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) Kindle's 250,000.

Google has been scanning books from major university and research library collections since 2004, and now has about 7 million titles total. But only those with expired copyrights can be made available to Sony.

It remains to be seen whether books written before 1923 will be as big of a draw as Amazon's best sellers, new releases, and newspaper/magazine subscriptions. Especially when many Sony customers (like me) already have free access to 100 of these titles, with their purchase of a Reader.

And Google's deal with Sony isn't exclusive: A spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal that they would be open to partnering with Amazon as well.

In other news:

How popular is the Kindle? Even ~~Darth Vader~~ Dick Cheney owns one, on which he has claimed to have read James McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief. The WSJ calls Cheney part of an "increasingly wired crew of politicians," going on to describe John McCain's recent "Twitter-based interview" with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. [Ed. note: Not sure what the point of using Twitter to interview a politician is... The only advantage I can think of is the 140-character limit.]

When humor site BBspot published a post early this morning claiming that Twitter Inc. had a revenue strategy, everyone should have known it was a hilarious joke without even reading past the headline. Sadly, as TechCrunch points out, many did not, even after reading this bit of subtlety:

Premium accounts will come in four tiers: Sparrow, Dove, Owl and Eagle... Users in any tier will be able to purchase an EmbellishTwit add-on for $100/year, which directs tweets to a well-educated offshore employee who will embellish tweets. For example, "Just had a whole wheat bagel and coffee for breakfast," becomes "Just got in from clubbing all night and Heidi Klum is spreading brie on a baguette just flown in on the Concord for my breakfast."

In other sad Twitter news: Twitter has been banned from an NBA locker room. Milwaukee Bucks coach Scott Skiles had told forward Charlie Villanueva he can't Twitter during games anymore. The offending Tweet: "In da locker room, snuck to post my twitt. We're playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up."

"You know, [we] don't want to blow it out of proportion," Skiles said. "But anything that gives the impression that we're not serious and focused at all times is not the correct way we want to go about our business."

Tags: Amazon, Google, Social Networks, Sony, Technology

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