Google makes thousands of books readable on cellphones
Last Updated: Friday, February 6, 2009 | 12:02 PM ET
CBC News
Canadians who use mobile phones to access the internet can now read 500,000 public-domain books via a new Google service.
Emma by Jane Austen, Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale are some titles made available Thursday on the mobile version of Google Book Search, more than four years after the company introduced the original version for PC users, formerly called Google Print.
The original version of the service provided scanned images of each page, which were difficult to read on a small screen. In order to produce the mobile version, the company digitized the text using programs that identify and recognize each letter so each word could be displayed in sequence, a few lines at a time, regardless of the screen size.
"Needless to say, it's a challenging task, but we're still working on improving the mobile versions of the books we've digitized," the company said in a statement.
More than 500,000 books that aren't protected by copyright, such as those published more than a century ago, are available around the world to users of devices such as Android phones or the iPhone.
3 times more titles available in U.S.
U.S. users will be able to access one million additional titles. That's because copyright laws vary from country to country.
Unlike e-books designed to be downloaded to electronic readers such as Amazon's Kindle or the Sony reader digital book, books accessed through Google's service are only available while a user has an active internet connection.
However, Google spokeswoman Tamara Micner said Friday that the company plans to make the books available offline in the near future.
Online book retailer Amazon has indicated it plans to make books for its e-book reader, Kindle, available to mobile phone users, but did not say when.
Shortly after Google's original book search launched in the fall of 2004, it was hit with lawsuits from the U.S. publishing industry, which accused it of "massive copyright infringement," but the two sides managed to reach a deal in October.
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