Google announced on their blog this week that their amazing and comprehensive Google Book Search has gone moible. Google Book Search is the best entertainment web idea since Hulu, and now you can access 1.5 million books from it, including classics like Heart of Darkness, The Iliad, The Canterbury Tales, and Macbeth.
Although it looks seamless on your mobile device, the Google geniuses hit a few rough patches with some untransferable type and font. I'll let them explain:
If you use Google Book Search, you'll 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 prove unwieldy 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
So where a completely easy page works swimmingly.....
=> "Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson— which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. ...
There are also a few anomalies that drop like Ophelia into a quagmire of indecipherable font, and in other places book smudges. Here is an example of that the source code gone awry:
=> "lV~e.il!" .ÍAoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tl as ~tk¿* , I s&O.IL .éfiiíjz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1¿*y ¿i^n. sta¿rs ! Jfo» ura.ve ...
A lot of web experts, including cnet, calculate that this new Google endeavor is a start in the battle against Amazon's Kindle (even Random House announced a partnership with the best Iphone reader app Stanza). Either way, a battle for literature is win-win for the reader.
Comments
Google is so inventive. Now at the airport while I await for my flight, I will be on Google books. Although, will this ruin the little book shops at the airport that sell pricey books?. Makes you go hmmm.
Great Idea. Thanks for passing along the information. Access to information is never a bad thing, especially if it is free. I will check this out, especially since I like stanza so much.
so who in the us government cannot be trusted with idea's? because this is a part of my idea for education everywhere, which i emailed to the departement of education in washington DC.
and i have a solution for your stinking OCR problem. but you're never gonna get it know, because you refuse to write me back after years of trying, neither do you bother to offer me a job.
way to go google.
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