Submitted by Thomas Estilow on
It's official. Google Book Search has gone mobile! This means your iPhone just became a library overnight. There are over 1.5 million books available for reading while connected to cellular data or Wi-Fi networks in the US. Due to copyright restrictions only about one third of these titles are available outside the US.
The mobile version of Google Book Search has all of the classics of literature that have been available through the main site, however texts have been optimized for swift downloading and ease of use. Using optical character recognition (OCR) software, Google has converted the works into plain text.
Sometimes the conversion works poorly, so built into mobile Book Search is the capability to tap and see a scan of the original page, right on your iPhone. Google continues to work on advanced algorithms to preserve the print format of books over the web as much as possible.
Google Book Search on iPhone or an Android phone will surely compete with Sony's eReader and Amazon's Kindle device. The best part about it is that no additional expense is required to use the mobile Book Search. In fact, there's not even an app download to wait for. Just point your Safari browser to books.google.com/m and bookmark to your home screen! The icon even looks sharp.
Now the next time you're tempted to play Tetris maybe you'll read Dostoyevsky instead.