Google Book Search Goes Mobile
If you spend time on the mobile web, you know there's certainly no shortage of content already available on our phones. What if you're on the run and get a hankering for some classic literature though? Enter the just released Google Book Search Mobile at books.google.com/m.
It's a very handy new version of the site that lets you search through and read in full, 1.5 million books on your phone's browser. Regular Google Book Search users know that these books are all scanned in as images, but for the new mobile version Google has used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to grab the text on the pages. The whole system works quite well.
The OCR isn't perfect, but with a tap on your screen you can view the original image corresponding to a paragraph of text. I'm not a regular e-book reader, so I'm not sure how well the very simple display of Google Books for Mobile will work for extended reading sessions, but I'll be giving it a try.
After spending a few minutes perusing the political science section I found a number of interesting titles that I've bookmarked. The business and economics section is a charming selection of very old books. You have to remember that only works old enough to be in the public domain can be viewed in full for free, but if you can accept that then there's lots of fun to be had. You can also read very old magazines. On your phone!
Check out the Google Book Search blog for more details.
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Interesting move... Specialized vertical search are very important and google book search is an excellent example.
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This appears to work on iPhone and Android only. It works on desktop browsers (firefox 3.1 and camino at least), but fails on my Symbian Nokia E71 phone. I wonder what OS platform dependencies exist for GBS/m, or alternatively if this is a move away from Symbian support? Most other apps for mobile (GMail, Maps) are explicitly cross platform.
This product also has different international profiles, btw, since public domain is defined differently in various locales. Google staff have indicated that "620,000 books will be in full view worldwide" versus the 1.5 million in the U.S. (and they will make this distinction more obvious).
Pity it doesn't work on opera mobile yet. It's a cool service