Today the Kindle 2 was announced by Amazon, a product that now represents 10% of all Amazon’s orders. Now THAT is an amazing statistic. The popularity of the Kindle isn’t all that surprising when you compare it to a book… but your mobile phone is just as capable (if not more) than the Kindle to bring books to your mobile device. The main difference? The size of the screen.
That being said, Google announced last week that it was bringing 1.5 Million Books to Android and iPhones via Google Book Search. It takes books whose copywrites have expired and are now in the public domain and makes them easily available on your mobile handset. Here is a ridiculously quick overview:
I really can’t understand why Google is merely making “Android Optimized Websites” and not native applications for example, creating a “Book Market” on android that would work just like “Android Market”. It would categorize books based on subjects, allow you to search, download/view, rate books…
There seems to be a disconnect between the Google Android Team and the Google Mobile Team. The Mobile team’s priority should be to support ANDROID first and secondly support other mobile devices by optimizing products, services and websites for them. Is anyone else with me here? Does anyone else want to see Google Books as a free application in the market or perhaps a “Books” section of Android Market where you could download free books and even buy newer books?
Good needs to get on this! Amazon’s tight integration with the T-Mobile G1 might be a main reason for the disconnect, but that’s only a guess. It’s kind of interesting how these books were transferred to text and in some cases, the method wasn’t perfect. Google Book Search allows you to look at the original version of any section of text should you think there is a discrepancy (or maybe just curious) and this wasn’t shown in the above video.
Its interesting how Google converted original texts and it isn’t a perfect method. You can actually view any section of text from the original document if you think there is a discrepency (or if you’re curious) and this was not shown in the video above. Check out Google’s Blog Post for more or visit http://books.google.com/m from your Android device to try it yourself.
[Via Google