Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the Amazon Kindle.

Since 2004, Google has scanned about seven million books from major university and research library collections. The books available to Reader owners were written before 1923 and include classics and harder find titles.

The difficulty that Sony has is that Amazon's Kindle comes with 250,000 books in its Kindle library. These are the books people are most interested in reading, like new releases and best sellers.

Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive sniffed that works in the public domain, like those Google is making available to Sony, are easy to get since there are no copyrights attached.