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Google Books getting mobile  (View post)

hebbet [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, February 5, 2009
15 years ago4,603 views

Google announced today a mobile version of google books

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/02/15-million-books-in-your-pocket.html

Above 1 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

[Edit: Added last paragraph, added reference to it in title.]

David Hetfield [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Still not listed here..
http://m.google.com/?dc=gbackstop

You think they'll make Books its own icon? :)

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

I think an open blue book with yellow/white pages and black scrawl for text like in cartoons.

Something like the Notebook icon on Android/iPhone but opened up.

Matt Casey [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

(I work on Google OCR)

The OCR errors you're seeing there are the result of running a book with Early Modern English orthographic conventions through a modern English OCR engine. In EME, the letter s is often written in a form that looks like and f (there are other changes, too, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English#Orthographic_conventions). It's true that these are still OCR errors, and we're looking to fix this, but that passage isn't really indicative of the general OCR quality. Note that clicking on a paragraph will toggle between the page image and OCR text.

A better selection of good books for the mobile version is in the Featured Books section on the main page (or there's a non-EME Merchant of Venice at http://books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile/#Read?id=MgSoZJLtmGQC&page_num=29).

Mrrix32 [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Nothing in the SciFi/Fantasy category :(

And it doesn't work on the Nintendo DS Browser :(

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Matt, thanks, for some reason, that was the only result I got (and still get) when searching Google Book Search mobile for [shakespeare]. Checking it again now, I do see there is a white on light blue "Load more..." message below that single result, but it doesn't load anything after a while. And when I check the Merchant of Venice page you refer to, for some reason I'm seeing "No mobile preview" (from Germany, if that makes a difference)...

What percentage of books in Google Books' public domain collection is Early Modern English, by the way?

PS: I do sometimes get JavaScript errors though, not sure if that is related to using the mobile version with a non-mobile browser...
"Error: this.b is null
Source File: http: //books.google.com/googlebooks/ mobile/B52[...]D9.cache.html
Line: 1149"

Matt Casey [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Yeah, I believe that the source country does matter here because it uses that to determine a date to use for public domain. I wasn't able to reproduce the non-working "load more.." button as you described (I'm on firefox3/linux).

I don't have a number offhand for the percentage of EME books in the corpus, unfortunately.

I wasn't able to reproduce the javascript error you described. What browser are you using? Is the error correlated with a specific event? The front-end team didn't think that the source country should matter for that.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

(Matt, you can contact info[put at-character here]blogoscoped.com please so I can send you some more details on this)

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