As with so may other types of media, electronic books come in a variety of formats and just like video and audio there are competing interests at work.

The two big players Amazon and Sony both sell eBook readers, but the Sony PRS-505 has support for the open “ePub” format. Why does this matter? Because Google announced today that they’re throwing their weight behind ePub.

For us, this means 500,000 new books from Google’s extensive online library of public domain and copyright-expired works  are going to be available from the Sony book store to download onto the PRS-505 you got for Christmas.

(If you haven’t seen one by now, you really ought to head on down to your local Waterstones and have a play; they’re rather good)

Via [The Register]