Google Offers More Free Books for Mobile Phones

Google announced last week that it has made available to users of advanced mobile phones an additional five hundred thousand titles from its Book Search digital library. The Google Book Search Web application, accessed via a phone’s Web browser at books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile, now offers 1.5 million books to U.S. readers using smartphones such as the iPhone or Google’s own device, the G1.

The Web app features the complete text of classic literary titles, including books by Jane Austen, Kate Chopin, Aldous Huxley, and Walt Whitman, as well as works from a range of disciplines such as history, religion, and philosophy. The limited collection offers primarily nineteenth and early twentieth century American and British literature.

Google’s general Book Search library continues to expand, with nearly seven million books, most of which are no longer under copyright, in its digital catalogue. The company precluded potential copyright conflicts by agreeing, as part of an October lawsuit settlement, to invest over thirty-four million dollars in a Book Rights Registry that would oversee distribution of Book Search revenue to authors and rightsholders of copyrighted works.