Google Mobile Book Search for iPhone and Android

Google Book Search (fka Google Print) is a Google project that allows user to search the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database. Subsequently, user can view and read the partial snippets or complete full pages of the book content, or download in PDF format for the public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material.

Google Book Search is set to become one of the largest online book repository in the world, with the database already exceeding 7 millions copy of books, and growing everyday, of which over 1.5 millions of them are in public domain for US readers, which means the books can be downloaded and read for free, although many of them is already out-of-print. Non-US readers get access to over half a million public domain works, due to different copyright law.

Further good news to iPhone and Android owners is that Google has rolled out the mobile version of Google Book Search, where the books are optimized to be read on a small screen.

To access Google Book Search for Mobile, just point the mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m.

The mobile Google Book Search has to be accessed and read online though. User cannot pre-download the digital eBook into the iPhone or Android for offline reading, unlike the full web edition where a PDF version of eBook is available for free download for public domain free publications. Beside, as the books in Google Book Search for mobile are displayed after the text been extracted from the page images with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, some words may be translated wrongly and displayed weirdly. In this case, just tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text.