The date was June 29, 2007, I was at work and my girlfriend was waiting in a line to purchase the maximum number of the first iPhones released (yeah…she’s a keeper). Fast forward to July 11, 2008 and I was in line to buy the maximum amount of 3G iPhones allowed. I have been an advocate of the iPhone since it wsa first announced on January 9, 2007. It has lived up to all the hype.
Fast forward.
The Amazon Kindle was in high demand for Christmas 2008 and sold out fast. Within just a few months the Kindle already has some pretty stiff competition with the anouncement The Google Book Search Project which puts more than 1.5 million book titles at the fingertips of Apple iPhone and T-Mobile G1 users. With the launch today, Google has released mobile editions of its entire book collection.
Google used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to transform the scanned book pages into screen-friendly text for iPhones and G1s. To access Google Mobile Book Search, just point your mobile phone browser to http://books.google.com/m.
Google admits, there are some drawbacks to the OCR technology that occur when reducing the book’s pages to a small screen-friendly size, “Smudges on the physical books’ pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text,” reads the blog post announcing Mobile Book Search.
The difference between page image and extracted text is below:
"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. ...
"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 ...
Google is constantly updating its library of public domain books, currently 1.5 million strong. You can plan on this number increasing rapidly. With Google you learn to expect the unexpected.
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