San Francisco — The search engine collossus has leapfrogged with a new episode in its book digitization adventure, with a small but significant step both for expanding the reach of its massive library and supporting smartphones as a viable e-book platform with Thursday’s release of a long overdue mobile version of Book Search for the iPhone and Android, this time head-to-head with the likes of Amazon.com’s Kindle and Sony’s eReader.
Google said its latest mobile version of Book Search offers instant access to users of smartphones with over 1.5 million books available that are in its public domain, it announced today.
There is a lot of good stuff, including books of authors such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens were optimized so it can be effortlessly read on the small screen, a challenge the Google Book Search team called “daunting” in a blog post announcing the launch:
There is an interesting historical background about the work involved to prepare so many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you will notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but proves difficult to handle when viewed on a phone’s small screen.
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).
“We foresee a future where people across the globe can search, discover and access the world’s largest collection of books from any device,” Google spokeswoman Jennie Jarvis said in an e-mail.
Unfortunately, some potential errors exist in this system, also there are frequently occurring roadbloacks that keep the printed words from being accurately extracted, such as smudges, fancy fonts, old fonts, and torn pages, the team noted. As an example of an “extreme case,” the team presented the this page image from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground:
…and the resulting extraction:
=> "lV~e.il!" .?AoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tl as ~tk?* , I s&O.IL .?fii?jz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1?*y ?i^n. sta?rs ! Jfo? ura.ve …
“The technical challenges are daunting, but we will continue to develop enhancements to our OCR and book structure extraction technologies,” writes the Book Search team in a blog post. “With this release, we believe that we have taken an important step toward more universal access to books.”
Certainly, errors of this type will is going to cause problems to readers. However, when readers confront issues like this, they can simply tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text, so hopefully it would not be too big a hassle. If these errors occur frequently though, readers are likely to give up and just find something else to read, or find the content elsewhere. All of that said, iPhone and Android users should be happy to have a free library of literature at their finger tips.
Enthusiastic readers of classics will be able to find some very, very long tail of out-of-print books you have never even imagined to explore. Like 1897’s “Milk, Cheese and Butter: A Practical Handbook on Their Properties and the Process of Their Production, Including a Chapter on Cream and the Methods of Its Separation From Milk” by John Oliver, “The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great, With Preliminary Essays Illustrative of the History, Arts and Manners of the Ninth Century,” published in 1858, and “The Maid of Sker,” published in 1895 by R.D Blackmore, author of “Lorna Doone.” You could spend a lifetime reading them on your cellphone and never get through them all.
Nevertheless, there are many other alternatives available for e-book readers on the iPhone that can download copies of the books in advance to be read anywhere and at anytime. But for now, only out-of-copyright books are available on Google’s mobile site, but more and more new releases are also popping up on phones through companies like ScrollMotion as stand alone apps for a small price.
The e-book reader market has been increasing growing since the past year, with analysts estimating Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008. Last month, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos credited the “unusually strong demand” for the unit in helping the e-tailer beat Wall Street’s fourth-quarter revenue and earnings expectations.
Google, which recently settled a 3-year-old lawsuit with authors and publishers over its scanning project, may be timing this launch as a salvo to upstage Amazon, which is rumored to be releasing its next-generation Kindle later this month.