Following a report on Tuesday questioning the ethics surrounding free public-domain eBooks that were reformatted and made available for sale in Amazon’s Kindle store, BGR has learned that a similar scenario exists in Barnes & Noble’s NOOKbook store. In a thread entitled Scammers and Bottom Feeders: NOOKBooks Open for Business on Barnes & Noble’s public forums, users share a variety of complaints surrounding public-domain eBooks that are available for sale in the NOOKbook store. Beyon...

A report in Tuesday’s Washington Post reveals that Amazon is apparently selling free public-domain eBooks that have had their license information stripped. The eBooks in question originate from Project Gutenberg and are available there for free in a variety of formats including ePub, HTML and Kindle. Project Gutenberg — not to be confused with 80s legend Steve Guttenberg — was founded by eBook inventor Michael Hart and is known as the first generally available collection of free eBooks. It is also m...

Just in time for the expected Kindle 2 announcement, Google is apparently trying to steal some of the pre-announcement hype by launching its own mobile book reading service. Previously available on for desktop computers, Google Book Search is now available via a new mobile web site, providing on-the-go access to nearly 1.5 million public domain books. Point your mobile browser to books.google.com/m where you can peruse its book list via category, find the poplar titles in the “Featured Books” list...