Washington: Interead, the British company behind the COOL-ER electronic reader, announced a partnership with Google on Wednesday to add more than one million public domain books to its online bookstore.

Interead said out-of-copyright works scanned by the Internet giant would be available for free through the Coolerbooks.com website.

“We’re extremely proud to be the first ebookstore outside the US to partner with Google Books and we hope that the collaboration will make the appeal and accessibility of ebooks broader than ever,” Interead founder Neil Jones said.

Interead makes the COOL-ER e-reader, a rival to Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader. The COOL-ER supports 19 document formats including ePub and PDF and comes in eight colors. It sells for $249 in the United States.

Sony announced a partnership with Google in March to make copyright-free books available on its e-reader while Amazon offers more than 300,000 titles for the Kindle through its online bookstore.

Google has been scanning millions of books in the world’s libraries as part of its controversial Google Book Search project.