Apple put thousands of songs in music lovers’ pockets with its market-changing iPod. Now Google is offering users of Apple’s iPhone and Android-powered mobile devices a way to access millions of books through an initiative that brings Google Book Search to the mobile world.
Google on Thursday made available more than 1.5 million public-domain books in the U.S. — and more than 500,000 outside the U.S. — for mobile users to browse anytime at no cost.
“One of the great things about an iPhone or Android phone is being able to play Pac-Man while stuck in line at the post office,” wrote Viresh Ratnakar, Guillaume Poncin, Brandon Badger, and Frances Haugen of the mobile book team on the Google blog. “Sometimes, though, we yearn for something more than just playing games or watching videos.”
Universal Access to Books
Thanks to Google, mobile users can access some of literature’s greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from their phone. The content, which is already available on Google Book Search, has been optimized for reading on a small screen.
“Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other Web page. This extraction process is known as optical character recognition, or OCR for short,” Google’s team wrote. “Getting this right allows us to render the book in a way that follows the format of the original book.”
Google’s goal is to move toward universal access to books. Google is starting with 1.5 million books, but what they aren’t saying is these are books most people wouldn’t want to read unless a college professor forces them, quipped Michael Gartenberg, an independent technology analyst.
“This is browser-based. You can’t read these books offline. So I don’t know how important…