The timing is surely not coincidental. Next Monday, Amazon looks set to unveil the second version of the Kindle. So today, Google came up with a version of its Book Search that works on mobile handsets.
“Book Search” is a bit of a misnomer: it’s actually shaping up to be more of a “Book Read”. With the mobile service, Google says you can access the full text of 1.5m out-of-copyright books on your handset . And lest there be any doubt, it had this to say about its long-term ambition:
Ultimately, we envision a future where people across the globe can search, discover and access the world’s books from any device.
Take that, Kindle!
For now, Google’s “digital book” experience falls well short of Amazon’s. Most obvious is the absence of most of the books you would actually want to read. Google’s long fight with the book publishers has held it back – though now that it has reached a preliminary settlement of a class action suit (the agreement has yet to be ratified by the courts) Google hopes that publishers will soon turn to Book Search to sell works that are still in copyright.
Also, although screens like the iPhone are a great advance, they are nowhere near as easy on the eye as the E-Ink technology used by gadgets specifically designed for reading text, like the Kindle or Sony’s Reader.
There’s another problem. To make its books readable on a small handset, Google uses optical character recognition to turn the images of the original printed pages (the form in which it stores books at the moment) into simple text. The trouble is, OCR is still a work in progress, as Google warns in this blog post.
Still, Google has put down a marker. Before shelling out on that new Kindle, it might just be worth trying to wade through OCR translations of the goodies in Google’s digitised book stacks (like this 1853 version of Pride and Prejudice, courtesy of the New York Public Library.)
