This is awesome. You know how Google Books has all of these digitized books online? It looks like they’re finally starting to partner with tech companies and book retailers. Sony is going to make public domain books available (for free) on their eReaders, and Barnes and Noble is going to let people download the books for free.  This is huge.

About a year ago, I wrote a brief post about The Plastic Logic eReader. Guess who Plastic Logic recently decided to partner with? Barnes and Noble. This was to help them compete with Amazon and the Kindle. Now the two have Google. Here’s a prediction that I think is a near certainty: We’re going to be able to get Free public domain books on Google on one of the best eReaders out there. That equals free public domain books in a very easy to read format. Now do you see why it’s huge?

What This Means for Philosophy (and Academia)
Here’s another bold prediction. Google will not stop at public domain, and Amazon is in for a bit of a shock. Amazon is about to compete with a company that has the scariest business strategy you can imagine in a competitor. When Google competes with you, they generally figure out how to give away whatever you’re selling. My prediction is that we’re going to see Google books drastically drive down the prices of books that are not in the public domain. I bet you they’re working hard to figure out how they can have non-intrusive ads accompany books (either in a little column somewhere in the reader or somewhere during the download process). That would give them some money to either give away non-public domain books for free or much cheaper than what Amazon would sell them for.

Richard Chappell recently wrote  an interesting piece about shifting away from the traditional textbook publishing model. Google/Plastic Logic/Barnes and Noble have the opportunity to speed this up, and I think something close to what Chappell envisions may not be too far off.