Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Update 20060831: After doing some research (read: by actually checking out the Google Book Search site), I found that the books here are scanned in but not "OCRd". Hence they are not suited for reading on a phone. I added back the "Read Books" section at wap.abiro.com so you can try out how it works to read via the phone's browser. My experience is that it works much better via one of the free Java ME applications, as you flip whole pages, and much quicker, and you can typically change text size etc. If you are into the classics you'll find plenty to download at Project Gutenberg and you don't have to feel guilty about it, as they are all in the public domain.


That Google provides literature classics online is somehow considered controversial, but I don't understand why considering Project Gutenberg, Online Books etc have done so for years.

This doesn't have immediate implications for mobile access, but in e.g. Japan and Korea it's popular to read books and comics on mobile phones while commuting, so I hope Google will consider converting the books to formats easily read on phones, and possibly also provide a book reader for mobile phones. Such readers exist for plain text ebooks, and many of them are completely free.

For information about ebooks in general, please visit my ebooks pages.

Here are a few Java-based ebook readers for phones that I found at Tuxmobil:
Mobile Bookshelf
TequilaCat ebook reader
ReadManiac

Google provides printable versions of classic books on Internet - Yahoo! News