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With all the news surrounding the Kindle 2 it’s easy to forget that there are other eBook readers out there.  Well, Sony isn’t letting us forget that they have a reader out there as well.  Actually, they have two, one which actually has a touch-screen, both of which now have a vastly expanded library thanks to Google Books.

Sony has teamed up with Google to bring 500,000 public domain books to the Sony Readers for free.  Yeah, so you can get all your favorite Mark Twain, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare among others.  While the number sounds impressive, it begs the question of “how many people are actually going to be excited about this?”  Sure there’s college professors, or Literature students who study books from before the turn of the 20th century.  There might not be a huge amount of others that are really dying to read these older books on their Sony Reader.  Although, I wouldn’t mind getting a shot to actually read “The Divine Comedy” or “Beowulf” finally.

Along with the new books, Sony decided to drop the price of its PRS-700 Reader, the touch-screen model.  It used to retail for $400, and now goes for $350.  So it costs $9 less than the Kindle 2, has possibly a smaller official bookstore, but a ton of new public domain books.  The Sony Reader, however, is fully capable of reading PDFs, RTF documents and other formats that the Kindle 2 can’t.  I know I personally have a ton of PDFs that I wouldn’t mind carrying around with me to read on an eBook reader, and I see no reason to pay Amazon a few cents to convert it to a suitable format for me.

Of course, there are other ways to get books on the eBook readers that don’t require going through either Sony or Amazon.  Online stores such as Fictionwise, which was recently purchased by Barnes & Noble, offer eBooks in a variety of formats that can work on the Sony Readers, Amazon Kindle, or even Stanza on the iPhone/iPod touch.

Read [PR Newswire]