Via globeandmail.com
Google Inc. is inviting avid readers of the world to curl up with a good cellphone.
The Internet search leader announced today it is making more than 500,000 books already in the public domain available for free to smart-phone us
ers through a mobile version of its Google Book Search website. Readers in the United States will have access to more than 1.5 million books through the service. Through a new mobile site – books.google.com/m – users can search for and read full books on select Web-enabled cellphones.
Still, mobile users will only have access to a fraction of Google’s rapidly expanding digital library to start: Google has already digitized more than 7 million books through its Google Book Search service. Most of the titles have passed into the public domain, but some are still under copyright. The collection includes the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.“We founded Google Book Search on the premise that anyone, anywhere, any time should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture,” the company said in a statement. “We want people to be able to search and read the books we’ve digitized anywhere – not just when they happen to be at a computer.”
