Google Makes iPhone the New eBook Reader: Watch Out Kindle
Waiting for the new Amazon Kindle e-book reader is no fun. But if you already have an iPhone or a T-Mobile G1 in your pocket, over 1.5 million books are now at your fingertips. The Google Book Search project, ever controversial since its launch, launched yesterday mobile editions of its entire book collection.
Google used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to transform the scanned book pages into screen friendly text for iPhones and T-Mobile G1s. To access Google Mobile Book Search, just point your mobile phone browser to http://books.google.com/m.
Book Search for PCs displays scanned images of pages and Google openly admits the OCR technology used to make these pages small screen-friendly can have drawbacks. "Smudges on the physical books' pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text," reads the blog post announcing Mobile Book Search.
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