Filed under: Internet, Google, Mobile
Google offers 1.5 million public domain books for your mobile phone
Google has been scanning books for the last couple of years for the company's Book Search portal. Well over a million of those books are in the public domain, which means that Google can legally make the full text available online without running into any copyright issues. And this week the company upped the game by creating a mobile portal which basically means you can read any of those books on your computer or mobile phone. The new Book Search mobile portal is optimized for touchscreen devices like the iPhone or Google Android devices. But you can use it to find and read books on any internet connected device. I grabbed this screenshot using a desktop web browser.
1.5 million books are available to US readers, and over half a million of those books are available internationally. Many of the books are classics that were written long ago and which are no longer covered by copyright. But there are also some newer texts that have entered the public domain for one reason or another.
As Google points out, some of the books may contain errors, since the optical character recognition technology used to convert the scanned images to text is far from perfect. And Google added a neat trick that lets you see the original scanned image when you select any chunk of text.
Have you found anything interesting or surprising in the book list? Let us know in the comments.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
supernova_hq said 11:54PM on 2-07-2009
Do they also have a "fix this word" button, like they do for their translations? This would be a cheap, easy, accurate and efficient way for them to fix these scans.
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Dwight Stegall said 4:06PM on 2-08-2009
The Speak It addon for firefox would work well with this. I use it to read the news to me on Cnn.com while I'm working on my website.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3552
But beware when you highlight the text for this addon to read watchout for long lines of ********** it will read everyone and drive you crazy. :)
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