Google announced today a mobile version of google books
http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/02/15-million-books-in-your-pocket.html |
[Edit: Added last paragraph, added reference to it in title.] |
Still not listed here.. http://m.google.com/?dc=gbackstop
You think they'll make Books its own icon? :) |
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. |
(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). |
Nothing in the SciFi/Fantasy category :(
And it doesn't work on the Nintendo DS Browser :( |
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" |
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. |
(Matt, you can contact infoblogoscoped.com please so I can send you some more details on this) |