The Government Printing Office announced on December 14 of this year a new partnership it has entered into with Google Books to sell -- "for the first time" -- "e-book format" versions of some of its more popular titles. According to the Press Release, the titles will appear in the Google ebookstore, "which can be searched, purchased and read on any connected device with a capable browser."Keeping America Informed. O RLY?Publications mentioned specifically in the Press Release include the following, with their current price at the Google ebookstore noted and linked in parenthesis:The Budget of the United States, Fiscal Year 2011 ($9.99)Remembering the Space Age ($7.99)Borden's Dream: The Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC ($7.99)And this is the strange part: If you clicked on the links for these titles above you will quickly realise that there are freely and legally accessible electronic copies of these materials already available -- all of which are also able to be "read on any connected device with a capable browser." Which means that the GPO partnership with Google sells information that can be found freely online from GPO and other government sources, and in nearly identical formats.The Google ebookstore does not specify the file formats offered for these for-sale books, though the Press Release's qualifier implies strongly that these are PDF files locked into the Google ebookstore interface, or as Google likes to call it, "the digital cloud." Which means that if you download the freely available copies of these publications, you will actually have greater options for access (i.e., offline access, unattached to any specific account, and infinitely transferable) than you will if you purchase them. In other words, this partnership makes no sense at all. ...