Google makes 1.5 million books available on mobile, free

Over the past couple of years, Google’s been industriously scanning, cataloguing and digitising millions of books whose content has passed into the public domain. These books have been available for a while on Google Book Search, but now they’re available on mobile too.

If you point your iPhone or Android browser towards http://books.google.com/m, then you’ll find mobile-optimised versions of the books which display text, rather than the digital images provided on the non-mobile edition.

I should admit, too, that the headline’s slightly misleading – 1.5 million books are available in the USA, with just half a million of those available outside the US. That’s a shame, but almost certainly due to copyright issues – books in the public domain in the USA may well not be in the rest of the world.

Google Book Search for Mobile (via Inside Google Book Search)

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