Joel Liu's Library tagged epub →  View Popular, Search in Google

To download a book, search for a title over at Google Books. Public domain titles will have a download link in the upper right corner. Which brings us to the first major difference between the Kindle and this Google ()-Sony open book strategy: while Amazon only offers 300,000 titles, Google’s million books aren’t, for the most part, the most attractive ones, and Sony’s own ebook library doesn’t offer a choice as good as Amazon – at least when it comes to modern titles.

Sure, if you’re interested in an oldie, such as the Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Google’s library is a good choice, but if you’re looking to buy a digital copy of the latest bestseller, you’re more likely to find it on the Kindle than in Google’s library and Sony’s ebook store combined. You can sometimes buy an ebook online and then transfer it to your Sony ebook reader, but on the Kindle it’s simpler and easier to do.

He is developing Savory, the first native Kindle application. Savory is an open source epub and PDF converter that actually runs natively on the Kindle. While it doesn't add anything that you couldn't do from a desktop, it streamlines the process, allowing you copy epubs and PDFs to your Kindle over USB or download them from the web, and immediately read them offline. (O'Reilly provides bookworm, which converts DRM free epubs to HTML and lets you read them through the Kindle's web browser, as well as DRM-free .mobi formatted versions of much of O'Reilly's catalog at O'Reilly Ebook Bundles.) Here's Jesse on why he created Savory:

I'm in love with my Kindle. I've been reading ebooks on screens of various sorts for many years, but the Kindle2 is the first device that I actually enjoy reading as much as I enjoy reading paper books. I've tried other ebook readers, but for a variety of reasons, they just don't work for me. My goal is to make it easier for readers to read more free content on the Kindle.

Savory is based on the open source project Calibre -- a python application that lets you convert between multiple ebook formats. The implementation is a background daemon that uses inotify to immediately convert the file to the mobi format. To get a performance boost, it uses unladen-swallow -- Google's optimized version of Python. I find it exciting that this paves the way for 3rd party applications on the Kindle.