For anyone using any kind of elec­tronic reader — including a reg­ular com­puter — this addi­tion to Google Books may well prove quite useful:

I’m excited to announce that 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. 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. EPUB is a light­weight text-based dig­ital book format that allows the text to auto­mat­i­cally con­form (or “reflow”) to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open stan­dard sup­ported by a growing ecosystem of dig­ital reading devices, works you down­load from Google Books as EPUBs won’t be tied to or locked into a par­tic­ular device.

via Inside Google Books: Download Over a Million Public Domain Books from Google Books in the Open EPUB Format.

This kind of access shows some of the poten­tial of the public domain to allow for inno­va­tion and reuse. Thank Google — and Google adver­tisers, of course — for making it free. (They could legally sell public-domain works — there is no legal require­ment that such access be free and open.)

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