Neotake e-book search engine can help Kindle fans, other mobile users—and desktop people, too

Neotake.com, a new e-book search engine out of Spain, offers searching in 14 languages. In the nonmobile mode, the home page even changes to display popular books in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Esperonto, whatever.

Not only that, the Neotake site has a mobile version, Neotake.mobi, which works great with the Kindle’s “experimental” Web browser. P

Plus, Neotake lets you limit your search to ePub, PDF, Mobipocket, Plucker, Qioo or TXT. ePub works on Sony Readers and Nooks and many other dedicated e-readers, while Mobi, of course, works on Kindle.

I gave Neotake a quick spin. Standard public domain favorites were there. But perhaps the site isn’t doing commercial books, for I couldn’t find The Lost Symbol—hardly my favorite novel, but one enjoyed by millions. I also noticed that I didn’t see all the possible choices. A page for Sir Conan Doye’s A Study in Scarlet, a Sherlock Holmes novel, showed Feedbooks as the destination site without mentioning that it offered ePub and Mobi/Kindle options, not just PDF.

That said, I salute Jose Gomez, Neotake’s founder, an engineer by background, for his courage in starting up his site. I’d encourage him to persist. Your interface is off to a promising start, Jose—much easier to use than the ones for many e-book finders. And you can always scale up the numbers of books and expand the kinds offered; interface first! What’s more, I like your appreciation of ePub, the format used for thousands of listed books, even now.

One thing you need to do is conspicuously identify the Mobipocket format as Kindle-suitable and play up this fact. My own Kindle worked great with your site because your interface was so simple. While I dislike Amazon’s proprietary approach and favor ePub, it’s important to serve Kindle owners in the here and now.

Perhaps Project Gutenberg could team up with you to design a mobile version under the PG brand, so Kindle users and others could speed directly to PG books without other sites to distract them. Ideally the actual PG download link would be found in your engine. Oh, how it sucks to deal with PG’s mobile-hostile interface after yours has spoiled me.

If I were PG, I’d act fast before Google or another company snapped up Neotake eventually to make use of its interface. I love PG and it has many many fine points, but, objectively, the site as a horror show for mobile users even though there is talk of turning this around.

Tip: Jose’s search engine works with a mix of titles and authors’ names. So “Jungle Upton Sinclair” will get you to The Jungle in a hurry without Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and similar titles distracting you.