What if you could access literature’s greatest works right from your iPhone?
Well, now you can. Google has launched of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse.
While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen.
Google’s Book Search Mobile team explains, “There’s an interesting backstory about the work involved to prepare so many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you’ll notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone’s small screen.”
“Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short),” Google’s team explains.
“The extraction of text from page images is a difficult engineering task. Smudges on the physical books’ pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text,” Google’s team explains.
“Imperfect OCR is only the first challenge in the ultimate goal of moving from collections of page images to extracted-text based books. Our computer algorithms also have to automatically determine the structure of the book (what are the headers and footers, where images are placed, whether text is verse or prose, and so forth). Getting this right allows us to render the book in a way that follows the format of the original book,” Google’s team explains.
“The technical challenges are daunting, but we’ll continue to make enhancements to our OCR and book structure extraction technologies. With this launch, we believe that we’ve taken an important step toward more universal access to books,” Google’s team explains. “If you do bump into some rough patches where the text seems, well, weird, well, you can just tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text. Happy mobile reading!”
To try it out and start reading, fire up Safari on your iPhone and go to http://books.google.com/m.
[Attribution: PC World. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Carl H” for the heads up.]
