Everyone has an excuse for not reading so much anymore: Books are heavy, I spend all day reading on my computer, time is short (especially now that "Lost" is back on TV). But Google, in its quest to make you learn about new things, isn't hearing any of it. The company said today it has made 1.5 million books available for iPhones and cellphones that run its Android operating system.
"We envision a future where people across the globe can search, discover and access the world's books from any device," Google spokeswoman Jennie Jarvis said in an e-mail. The company is also exploring ways to sell copyrighted books through the same platform, she said. It's an exploding market: E-book sales increased 58% last year.
Google promises more to come. But don't stress too much: Since all of the titles are in the public domain, many probably wouldn't rank near the top 700 of your must-read list.
Google made its books available in a more phone-ready format by extracting text from the page images, through a process called Optical Character Recognition, which guesses which letters are forming the words on the page. That means that rather than deal with big, cumbersome files on your phone, you can read the books just as you would any other Web page.
Worth noting for the skimmers among you: Mobile book search lumps together a bunch of pages onto one screen, so you can scroll down rather than turn virtual pages. That makes it easy to blow through chapters with the roll of a finger.
I just donty know if I would appreciate reading via phone as opposed to physically flicking through the pages. Thoughts?
Source: LA Times
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