Interead, the British company behind the COOL-ER electronic reader, announced a partnership with Google on September 2 to add more than one million public domain books to its online bookstore. Interead said out-of-copyright works scanned by the Internet giant would be available for free through the Coolerbooks.com website.
Interead makes the COOL-ER e-reader, a rival to Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader. The COOL-ER supports 19 document formats including ePub and PDF and comes in eight colors. It sells for 249 dollars in the United States. Google has been scanning millions of books in the world's libraries as part of its controversial Google Book Search project.