<\/p>\n

Google continues to roll out new mobile products.\u00a0 Monday it was Tasks<\/a>, yesterday Latitude<\/a> and today we have Google Mobile Book Search<\/em> at books.google.com\/m<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s an iPhonesque mobile interface into 1.5 million\u00a0 public domain books that Google has scanned as part of its Book Search project. I heard about it first\u00a0 from microflash<\/a> on Twitter.\u00a0 There’s an official announcement on the Inside Book Search<\/a> blog.<\/p>\n

The new mobile interface lets you search\u00a0 for and read any of\u00a0 the 1.5 million books, which are mainly out of copyright works published before 1923.\u00a0 More modern books published under Creative Commons license, like Cory Doctorow’s excellent\u00a0 novels, don’t seem to be included.<\/p>\n

On the full web, Google book search displays the original scanned book pages as images. Google uses OCR to create text copies of the books so that they are searchable. For the mobile project the plain text is displayed\u00a0 along with the books’ original illustrations.<\/p>\n

It all works pretty well, search is fast and you can browse through categories like History, Classics, Science etc.\u00a0\u00a0 Google remembers what books who have read recently and your approximate position in each one.\u00a0 The persistence is cookie based so to it’s\u00a0 tied to a particular device and not really bulletproof as browsers tend to lose their cookies.\u00a0\u00a0 The OCR is a bit flaky and it’s not hard to find passages of gibberish in many of the books. OCR’ed books really need to be gone over\u00a0 by a human editor.\u00a0 Google, with 1.5 million books to deal with, took a different approach. The books are unedited but clicking anywhere in the\u00a0 text brings up the original scanned image of just that text snippet. In the image below, the words “limbs which intend by cycling…” are an image, the rest is text.\u00a0 It’s a very slick piece of mobile Ajax magic although having to do to click back and forth between image and text to make sense of what you are reading is a usability issue.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I think it’s a mistake to look at Google Mobile Book Search as an eBook reader. <\/strong> If you just want to read a classic novel like Anna Karenina you are nuch better off downloading a proofread copy from Project Gutenberg<\/a> and reading it with an eBook reader application like Mobipocket, Plucker or TCBR.\u00a0 There won’t be any gobbledygook, pages will turn faster, the reader will remember your exact place in the book between sessions and you’ll be able make annotations.\u00a0 The real value of Google Book Search is as a research tool. Project Gutenberg has just about every Classic book I’ve every heard of but its total collection is only 27,000 books, and it took a small army of dedicated volunteers 37 years to scan and proofread those 27,000 volumes.\u00a0 Google has scanned\u00a0 and OCRed 7 million books in 4 years as part of the Book Search project.\u00a0 Google’s repository of scanned books is a tremendous resource, the largest digital library ever.\u00a0 It includes all sorts of obscure documents; trade catalogs, academic journals and magazines from long ago that can’t be found anywhere else online.<\/p>\n

The mobile version of Google Book Search doesn’t offer the advanced search interface of the full web version which means that there is no obvious way to do an author or title search,\u00a0 just a simple full-text search.\u00a0 However I discovered a couple of search qualifiers; intitle:<\/strong> and inauthor:<\/strong> that will do the trick.\u00a0 You can do title and author searches using;\u00a0 intitle:”War and Peace”<\/em><\/strong> or inauthor:”Karl Marx”<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for many of us, Mobile Book Search only works with the iPhone and the Android G1 (and desktop browsers) .\u00a0 It relies heavily on JavaScript and in most mobile browsers, even powerful ones the the S60 WebKit browser and Opera Mini, Opera Mobile 8.65 and\u00a0 UCWeb, all you will see is a blank page.\u00a0 If you are desperate to try it out on lesser phones, Mobile Book Search does work reasonably well in the Bolt and TeaShark Java based mobile browsers. It’s not a perfect solution though, with these unsupported browsers, clicking to view the scanned version of text doesn’t work and\u00a0 you have\u00a0 to scroll way over to the right to find the “Next Page”\u00a0 button. Update 9-Feb-2008: <\/strong>Mobile Book Searchis now working in Opera Mini (desktop view only) with the same limitations (the Next Page button requires horizontal scrolling to reach and clicking the text doesn’t reveal the original scanned text) as with Bolt and Teashark.<\/p>\n

I think it’s great that Google can still release something like Google Mobile Book Search which seems to have no immediate opportunities for revenue.\u00a0 It carries no advertising and while I gues it gives Google lots of insight into what people are looking for in pre-1923 books, I don’t really see any way to monetize that information.<\/p>\n

I suspect that Google may have\u00a0 bigger mobile\u00a0 ebook plans than Google Mobile Book Search.\u00a0 The full web version of Book Search includes books that are available for purchase through affiliated book stores.\u00a0 Google has the full text of all those books and could develop a program in cooperation with publishers to sell books in a variety of eBook formats.\u00a0 Perhaps Mobile Book Search is a technological proof of concept and Google testing the waters to see how much interest there is in mobile eBooks.\u00a0 Could the next step be a Google Mobile eBook Store?<\/p>\n

Related Posts<\/em>
\neBooks in Your Phone<\/a>
\nHow to Read eBooks on Almost Any Phone<\/a>
\nGoogle Latitude – This is Big!<\/a>
\nGoogle Tasks For Mobile Released<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google continues to roll out new mobile products.\u00a0 Monday it was Tasks, yesterday Latitude and today we have Google Mobile Book Search at books.google.com\/m.\u00a0 It’s an iPhonesque mobile interface into 1.5 million\u00a0 public domain books that Google has scanned as part of its Book Search project. I heard about it first\u00a0 from microflash on Twitter.\u00a0 There’s an official announcement on the Inside Book Search blog. The new mobile interface lets you search\u00a0 for and read any of\u00a0 the 1.5 million … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[65],"tags":[1436,204,598,148],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2839"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2854,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839\/revisions\/2854"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}