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Google book search goes mobile today
February 5, 2009 | 3:04 pm
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By Paul Biba
From the Inside Google Book Search blog:
Today we are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books for you to browse while buying your postage.
While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen. To try it out and start reading, open up your web browser in your iphone or android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.
Here is a screen shot of the book, itself, taken from my iPhone. Of course this is on line only. There doesn’t seem to be a way to download the book to the phone, itself. The text, as the blog points out, is not scanned, but is fed through OCR.
Here is a shot of the opening page where you can browse for books by name or categories, store books you are reading under My books, and see featured books of the day. It’s a nice implementation. For some reason it does not work on the browser in my Nokia E71.
Without local storage this implementation will be of limited use, in my opinion.
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Comments:
It’s worth noting that this format doesn’t just work for mobile readers
Those idiots at Google just don’t get it. The only way I can access those books are with my Ipod Touch. They have had all those great books for years now, but they are useless to most of us, because of the OCRed Pdf format. They do not work on any of the new ebook readers. The same can be said for The Internet Archive. They can both stick those books in their ears as far as I am concerned. There is no brains to get in the way. Google finally has some well formated books and they fix it so they can”t be downloaded.
If only publishers woke up and cut a deal with Google so that not only free books would be available but stuff that I actually want to read!
on a related thought it;s interesting to see poeple counting in number of books… it’s like counting in Gigabytes.
I don’t care how many books are there… I only care if the one I want is there. And presently it’s not – even though Google has already scanned it.
Isn’t that stupid?
Doesn’t anyone besides me dig below the damned hype?!
http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/02/google-book-search-goes-mobile-teh.html
Personally I see this as a large step forward. You folks can carp about not (yet) being able to download the OCRed text from this site (though you can from the regular Google Books site) and about the OCR errors (which, for all we know, Google will be logging corrections to by noting those passages where readers click to view the image version) — but we’re talking about MORE THAN ONE AND A HALF MILLION FREE BOOKS! And if their lawsuit settlement is approved, another 10-20 million will be available for a fee (in part to pay the authors). For heaven’s sake, this is a work in progress. Give credit where credit is due.
I agree this is a great step in the right direction but downloading plain text instead of just PDF is key for all us ebook readers. And I don’t see any Google site where you can do that now. Books.google.com still only offerr PDF downloads. I blogged a bit about this today here:
http://gravitationalpull.net/wp/?p=697