Google Book Search Goes Mobile

Writing on the Google Book Search Blog earlier this week, the team unveiled a mobile Web address for its library of nearly 1.5 million public domain books that have been scanned into the archive.

"We are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the U.S. (and over half a million outside the U.S.) for you to browse while buying your postage," wrote the Book Search Mobile team on the blog.

To access Google Book Search on a mobile device, such as a T-1 Android phone or Apple iPhone, plug http://books.google.com/m into a mobile browser and start reading.

The books, incidentally, have been optimized for reading on a mobile device using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to bring the text from page to screen.

The books in Google Book Search are created by digitizing physical copies of books. But translating to a PC browser or mobile browser has proven to be a challenging task for the Book Search team. Smudges on the original copy of the work, old fonts or tears on the page can lead to improper rendering, the team said in its blog.

By using OCR, these errors tend to be reduced with the help of an algorithm. Still, there may be imperfect copies of literature in a mobile browser, the team said.

"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," said the Google Book Search team.

Recognizing that there might be errors in the texts, Google Book Search allows users to tap on a patch of text that might appear "weird" in order to see the original page and section of the text. That lets human eyes take a look at a tricky passage that the algorithm may have improperly read.

The Google Book Search team knows that their product isn't perfect yet, but pledges to continue to keep working on advancing OCR technology until the imperfections and blemishes become fewer and farther between.

"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," said the Books Search Team.

For people who are constantly reading, Google Book Search is a pretty impressive alternative to scanning through the text on the cereal box in the morning or the ads in a subway car.