Google has spent the past few years scanning books, and creating the Google Book Search portal. This week, the company released a new mobile portal that allows you to read those books on your mobile device whenever you want.

The Book Search mobile portal was created with the iPhone and Google Android devices in mind, but it will theoretically work on any mobile device that is connected to the good old World Wide Web. Currently there are over 1.5 million books available on the service; with over half a million of those books available for international users.

One important thing to note about the service is that it only contains books that are in the public domain. That means books that have either become so old the copyrights on them has expired, or books that never had a copyright in the first place- so you’re not going to find the latest best seller on this thing. It could be great however to read through some older texts, or frankly when you’re bored and looking for something…anything….to read then this could be a pretty quick and easy solution.

All of the text versions of the books are created by Google scanning pages of the actual manuscripts, and then using character recognition software to create text versions of the books for you to read. The end result is text documents that you’ll more than likely find a few errors in (they’re not perfect) but for the most part are pretty readable.

Personally, I have a hard enough time reading my email on my iPhone while I’m on the go. I can’t imagine trying to read a few pages- much less an entire manuscript of a book on my phones little screen. What about you? Would you read an e-book on your mobile phone?

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Entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 2:45 am under Google.

Read more entries by Emily Price.
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