Google has always been an advocate of open standards and for good reason. Open standards are good business if you know how to take advantage of them and the software giant certainly has a talent for that. And now, despite still being one of the company's most controversial projects, Google Books has started offering one million public domain books in ePub format, an open e-book format that is starting to gain industry support.

“Starting today, Google Books will offer free downloads of these and more than one million more public domain books in an additional format, EPUB. By adding support for EPUB downloads, we're hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places,” Brandon Badger, product manager, said.

“More people are turning to new reading devices to access digital books, and many such phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers have smaller screens that don't readily render image-based PDF versions of the books we've scanned.”

The ePub format stands for “electronic publication” and is an open e-book standard designed to work on a variety of devices and screens. Because the contents are text based, either XHTML or a custom XML standard to be precise, the text can re-adjust itself to the viewing area, which can be very useful especially on the small screens of mobile phones or other mobile devices.

Anyone can now download public domain works from Google Books in ePub format as well as in the already available PDF format. While the ePub books can be read by a variety of devices or applications, the timing of the announcement coincides with the release of the latest Sony Reader, which is very unlikely by accident. Sony just so happens to be a major backer of the ePub standard and has, in fact, partnered with Google in the past by offering millions of public domain books from the Internet company on its e-book store.