Google Brings Shakespeare and Twain to Your IPhone

Google has adapted its Book Search for the iPhone and its own Android platform, it announced on Thursday. It joins a growing group of network operators and content providers that are putting books on mobile phones.

Google originally began digitizing books to make them accessible over the Web from a PC through its Book Search service. Beginning with scanned images of the books' pages, Google used optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract and index the text to make it searchable.

On a PC, someone searching for a quote is shown the high-resolution image of the corresponding page, but those pages won't easily fit on the small screen of a mobile device, so for the new service Google sends just the text, as it would for any other text on a Web page.

The new service opens up mobile access to 1.5 million public domain books in the U.S., and half a million outside the U.S., Google said.

The technology is still being perfected, so automatically recognized texts can include errors. If you hit "patches where the text seems, well, weird, well, you can just tap on the text to see the original page image", Google said in a blog posting about the mobile service.

Books can be searched for, or located via a number of categories, including adventure, classics and drama. Titles available on the mobile version include classics such as Oliver Twist, Shakespeare's King Henry V, The Jungle Book and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

But Google isn't the only one interested in putting books on mobile phones.

Amazon is working on making titles for its popular e-book reader, the Kindle, available on a variety of mobile phones, according to the New York Times, and U.K. mobile operator 3 recently launched "Books on the Go", which offers books in both text or audio format for between £5 and £10.

The growing popularity of dedicated readers have made the mobile industry realize that there is an opportunity here -- just like it in the past has put music and games on the phone to turn it into a one-stop-shop, according to Paolo Pescatore, analyst at CCS Insight.