Google is pushing smartphones as the home of e-books with the release of its mobile version of Book Search. iPhone and Android devices will now be in competition with book readers like the Kindle and eReader.
Authors in the Google public domain include William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. The pages have been optimized so they can be read easily on a small touchscreen
From Google:
“The technical challenges are daunting, but we will continue to develop enhancements to our OCR and book structure extraction technologies,” writes the Book Search team in a blog post. “With this release, we believe that we have taken an important step toward more universal access to books.”
What we think?
There have already been mutterings about the technical difficulties involved in this venture. Bad text recognition, eye strain and other difficulties are well known. I don’t think that’s the most important issue here, though. Technical challenges like that will, in time, be overcome – just legal challenges were. I’m more interested in the growing trend of moving books over mobile devices. This could become a serious challenge to the book publishing business if it gets decent pick up.
