Google Puts Free Books on iPhones, Androids

Google has opened up its entire archive of 1.5 million books to mobile iPhone and Android browsers, and converted all their page scans to text for much easier reading.

The works, almost all in the public domain realm, can be accessed by heading to books.google.com/m in an Android or iPhone/iPod touch browser. Those outside the U.S. get access to just over half a million books, for various copyright reasons. Every page went through Google's specialized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scan, the same type of process your scanner uses to create Word documents. If you discover a bit of gobbledy-gook in extracted text, tap the text and the original page image will load for source checking. If offline ebooks on your iPhone or touch are more your speed, try the Stanza ebook reader we dig.

1.5 million books in your pocket [Inside Google Book Search]