Millions of books for the iPhone and Touch
How many times have we said that it was time that we read the classics? Now, with the announcement of millions of public domain titles for the iPhone and iPod Touch via Google, it is easier than ever to do just that.
The titles will also be available, of course, on devices powered by the Google Android operating system. In explaining the reason for the book availability announcement, the three members of the mobile book team at Google (Viresh Ratnakar, Guillaume Poncin, Brandon Badger, and Frances Haugen) had this to say: “One of the great things about an iPhone or Android phone is being able to play Pac-Man while stuck in line at the post office. Sometimes, though, we yearn for something more than just playing games or watching videos.”
There will be more than 1.5 million titles from the U.S. alone, with another half million coming from outside the U.S. All of these books are in the public domain, meaning that they are available to the reader without the payment of royalties to the author. The titles have been available on Google Book Search for some time and are now being optimized for viewing on the smaller screens of devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch, according to a Yahoo news article.
The Google Book Search team says, “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. Getting this right allows us to render the book in a way that follows the format of the original book.”
A lot of the titles being made available are not well known to the reading public, though professors of literature everywhere would find much of the list to be familiar. For a sample of the literature titles of the books available, readers can go to Google Book Search. Although not for everyone, this is a service that would give most of us a better grounding in classic literature, philosophy, and other important historical genres.
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