Google Books Signs Another Hardware Partner with Spring Design

The e-book space is becoming increasingly disputed and there a number of players, of various backgrounds, contending for a piece of the potentially lucrative market. The clear leader at the moment is Amazon with its Kindle device and e-book store. But Google is taking another approach, more in line with the Google of old, by focusing on the service and, in this case, content and leaving the hardware to specialized parties. The latest partnership is with Spring Desing, maker of the Alex eReader device, which will get access to Google Books' extensive library of free and paid digitized books and the deal is said to make one million books available to Alex users.

“We are pleased to work with Spring Design and the Alex, which is an exciting new reading device, that combined with a wealth of free public domain books from Google, provides great value to eReaders,” Brandon Badger, Google product manager, said in a statement. “Our relationship with Spring Design is helping to expand the number of ways people access eBooks and search for information online, whether for business, education or entertainment.”

The upcoming device, which will be launched at CES later this week, is pretty interesting and, with the right circumstances, could prove a rather popular e-book reader. It runs Google's mobile phone operating system Android and has a dual-screen layout enabling it to be more than just an e-book reader. It features an expected 6 inch e-ink display, perfect for digital books, but also a smaller full-color screen which can be used for various other tasks. The device sports a full-blown web browser as well as audio and video playback.

Books in the open EPUB format can be searched online and downloaded through an app powered by the Google API. This will give users access to more than one million e-books available on Google Books. Google has had more than its fair share of trouble since launching Books and a controversial lawsuit over its book-scanning project is still ongoing, though the recent settlement revision should bring it very close to an end.