Google, Amazon To Release E-Books For Mobile Devices
Posted on: Friday, 6 February 2009, 10:45 CST
Google Inc. and Amazon on Thursday announced respective plans to make a number of e-books available for smartphones and mobile devices.
Google, who currently owns a gathering of 1.5 million public domain books as a part of its Book Search program, said it plans to make them all available for users of mobile devices such as the Apple Inc.’s iPhone and T-Mobile’s G1.
Additionally, Amazon, which owns the popular Kindle e-book reader, said it is in the process of making many titles available for mobile gadgets as well.
“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”
Amazon, who is set to release the second version of its widely popular Kindle e-book reader, currently offers about 230,000 titles. The company did not mention when the books would be available for mobile phones.
Titles owned by Amazon are expected to be more popular than those offered by Google, because Google primarily owns older titles with expired copyrights. Amazon’s literary lineup consists of newly released books and many best sellers.
Google’s Book Search consists of 1.5 million scanned copies of books as well as magazines, but unlike its Book Search service for PC’s mobile version simply displays text, allowing users to download printed material more quickly over wireless networks, according to the New York Times.
“Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short),” the Book Search Mobile Team wrote on its Blog.
“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.”
“This is our first step, but it is an important step,” said Frances Haugen, product manager for Google Book Search.
Users of Apple’s iPhone already have access to a growing number of titles via services such as Lexcycle’s Stanza and Fictionwise’s eReader, both of which are available on its App Store.
Analysts say that traditional paperbound books are not expected to be dethroned by e-books.
While mobile phones are good for quick access to reading material, their backlighted screens are “terrible for long-form reading,” Evan Schnittman, vice president for global business development at Oxford University Press, told the NYT.
“It hurts the eyes. The pages of a book are the size they are because of hundreds of years of experience of what works best.”
However, Michael Gartenberg, an independent technology analyst, said: “Consumers will trade a certain amount of quality for convenience and cost.”
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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