Google is opening a latest chapter in its book digitization saga, this time pleasing on the likes of Amazon.com's stimulate and Sony's eReader
It commenced a mobile version of its Google Book Search, giving iPhone and Android users instant access to more than 1.5 million public domain books. The works of authors such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens were optimized to be read on the small screen, a confront the Google Book Search team called "daunting" in a blog post declared the launch:
There's a motivating back-story about the work involved to practice so many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you'll notice that our previews are poised 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 reachable is to remove 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 However, as the team notes, there are frequently obstacles that keep the printed word from being accurately extracted, such as smudges, fancy fonts, old fonts, and torn pages. As an example of an "extreme case," the team presented this page image from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures under Ground…