Friday, February 6, 2009

Google Books for iPhone and Android phone

Yesterday (2009.02.05), Google announced:

Today 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 US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse while buying your postage.

While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen. To try it out and start reading, open up your web browser in your iphone or Android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.
Interesting... As noted on Yahoo Tech news, this poses something of a challenge to Amazon's Kindle reader. (Also note the other free ebook apps for iPhone mentioned there: Stanza, eReader or BookShelfLT.)
I did check out the mobile Google book site, and there is a whole section on Religion with the usual suspects of public domain books. There are a number of Greek texts such as Winer's 1874 Grammar or Souter's 1913
Text and Canon of the NT or Goodwin's 1860 Syntax. To keep things efficient for a mobile device, everything has been rendered with OCR, but in the instances with Greek, note that you can click on the paragraph to have the original appear as a graphic. (Cf. the graphic below with the image of the Greek and the confused Greek OCR below it.)

In any case, it's all free and may prove helpful to you.

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