If you’ve ever dreams of reading literary classics on your iPhone or Android device instead of buying a Kindle or working to shoehorn free etexts onto your phone, Google has some good news for you: the company has launched a mobile version of Google Book Search (point your phones here) that provides mobile access to more than 1.5 million public domain books—at least in the United States. (Outside the U.S., selection is currently limited to half a million titles.)
The titles available in the mobile version of Google Book Search are already available on the Web-based Book Search, but have been optimized for reading on small screens—the text re-flows just like text in an email message or a window. And, if the OCR process that converts images of the original manuscript into text makes a mistake or produces gibberish (which can happen with smudged or damaged pages, elaborate typography, etc.), users can tap on the text to see the original page image…which might be more intelligible to a human reader than a computer.
Most of the books available in the mobile version of Google Book Search were published before 1923, and include titles like Mark Twain’s Roughing It, Kipling’s The Jungle Book,Grimm’s Fairy Tales, E.M. Forster’s Howards End, and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Heck, there’s even Victor Appelton’s Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera…in which the young inventor worries about someone stealing his high-tech patents on the very first page. Pretty prescient for a 1912.
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