Interread, the British company that owns CoolerBooks.com, has announced a partnership with Google in which it will include over a million public domain books from Google Books in its online library. This makes CoolerBooks the first ebookstore outside the US to partner with Google Books.
Beginning today, CoolerBooks.com will feature a Google API with out of copyright works from the Google Books index that users can access for free via both the CoolerBooks site and the Cool’ER ereader. According to CoolerBooks, this makes it the largest ebookstore in the world.
“At Interead, our aim has always been to make ebooks available to ordinary book lovers, not just technology enthusiasts,” says Neil Jones, founder of Interead. “We want everyone to be able to enjoy the content on COOLERBOOKS.com, so even if you don’t own one of our COOL-ER ereaders you can still download your favourite titles.”
“And now, our partnership with Google allows us to offer more content than anyone else, as well as giving readers the freedom to have a look through ebooks that they might be interested in,” adds Jones. “We’re extremely proud to be the first ebookstore outside the US to partner with Google Books, and we hope that the collaboration will make the appeal and accessibility of ebooks broader than ever.”
Despite pressure from a number of companies and organizations over the Google Books settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, Google has been very busy at bolstering its Google Books offerings and partnerships.
Recently Google has also partnered with Sony, and it has begun offering a new way for authors and publishers to offer content for free under the Creative Commons license. In addition, Google recently added a bunch of features to Google Books including: embedding and links, better search within books, thumbnail views, contents drop-downs, plain text mode, page turn buttons/animation, and improved book overview pages. Downloads are also now compatible on more devices.
As far as the settlement, the deadline for comments is September 4th – 2 days from now.
