Google Book Search has just been announced for iPhone and Android, letting iPhone and T-Mobile G1 owners read millions of public domain books on their blower. Will this kill the Amazon Kindle? Has the Sony Reader had its chips? Find out after the jump!
Google Book Search for iPhone and Android differs from traditional e-readers, in that the words you’re seeing haven’t been typed in – they come from a real life, printed page.
Google scans in the pages, and then uses optical character recognition (OCR) to turn it into typed text. It shows the words as if they were a web page on the handset, minimising the amount of scrolling needed. And if the spacing looks a bit odd, you can simply tap to see the original scanned in page instead. All of a sudden, you’ve got a library with everything from Jane Austen to Arthur Conan Doyle, for free, wherever you go.
It’s seriously impressive. And all this after Google announced it was cutting jobs. But it seems the search giant just keeps rolling out new services.
Google says it’s adding more books all the time, so this could be a serious threat to the likes of the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. Is this one you would use though? Could you really read a novel on an iPhone or G1 screen? Let us know in the comments.
Out Now | £free | Google Book Search
