1.5m books in your pocket - with Google Books Mobile

[Alexander Turcic]

Matthew just sent us in this fantastic news: The mobile version of Google Books has gone live. The site seems primarily aimed at mobile phones, but I'd be interested to see if the Kindle and other wireless E Ink readers could use it. If so, this would offer a mobile library that would certainly merit a special announcement (perhaps on February 9).

Information about the mobile version of Google Books can be found on the Google Books blog.

[tompe]

Strange. It did not work on my S60 phone with the standard browser. I just get a blank page (it works in my iceweasel on my laptop).

[Madam Broshkina]

Works great on the iPhone. Can't see myself reading much on it but nice to knows its there.

[koland]

Originally Posted by tompe

Strange. It did not work on my S60 phone with the standard browser. I just get a blank page (it works in my iceweasel on my laptop).

Works fine on desktop, completely blank screen on Mogul (standard IE browser).

Looks ok on iphone (once I managed to type in the address, which is painful with the touch screen keypad). But we all know that no one using Apple products reads anymore (after all, Jobs has spoken about his demographic).

[Madam Broshkina]

I actually read this post on my iPhone via MobileRead Mobile so I just had to clink the link to get to the site. I do not find the touch screen keypad all that painful though.

[mobelby]

Sound like something worth testing out with the wireless version of the Hanlin v3 when it comes out......

(Trying to be patient !!)

[Greg Anos]

I went out there to check it out via desktop browser. Very sluggish. Pulled up Jurgen by James Branch Cabell. Text was typical OCR'ed without proofing. A very good level of OCR, but clearly no proofing.

[lilac_jive]

So are all of these public domain books?

[Charbax]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

So are all of these public domain books?

Yup but any minute now Google might launch commercial books as well according to the Google Book Settlement http://books.google.com/booksrightsholders/

As you can see on http://books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile/ they have an option to filter by "Free books", which obviously means it'll soon also have books that are either part of a new unlimited Google book subscription, I'm guessing $10 per month could do it for an unlimited access to a whole bunch of books, newspapers and magazines. Or it could be pay-per-donload books as well. It'll all be up to the copyright owner to opt-in or opt-out any of those monetization plans, until Obama launches an Art tax plan which will allow Google to provide full open access to all content even commercial content with only an opt-out option for copyright holders. Though opting-out being available for free online thus getting money through the art tax will be pretty much pointless.

Amazon should provide a full access to Google books on their Kindles. If Amazon wants to charge for bandwidth used on free stuff, they can charge per megabyte when people watch or download books and other stuff from outside of the Kindle store.

[Andybaby]

Originally Posted by Charbax

Amazon should provide a full access to Google books on their Kindles. If Amazon wants to charge for bandwidth used on free stuff, they can charge per megabyte when people watch or download books and other stuff from outside of the Kindle store.

per meg on cell phones is ussually $10

[Charbax]

Originally Posted by Andybaby

per meg on cell phones is ussually $10

That pricing would be completely insane. That's $10'000 per GB. Ridiculous.

In regular 3G networks, pricing per GB may be somewhere between $1 and $10 thus somewhere between $0,001 and $0,01 per Megabyte.

Thus $1 for 100mb to be used as the user pleases on Google Books, Google News or Google Reader items, that would be reasonable. Amazon can just charge people automatically, or charge as a pre-paid model. Put some bandwidth credit on your Kindle account and you can see the pricing go down as you pull ebooks, news items, blog posts and whatever else should be available. This should also include all project Gutenberg content and whatever other sources for compatible content.

[erayd]

Originally Posted by Charbax

That pricing would be completely insane. That's $10'000 per GB. Ridiculous.

In regular 3G networks, pricing per GB may be somewhere between $1 and $10 thus somewhere between $0,001 and $0,01 per Megabyte.

Thus $1 for 100mb to be used as the user pleases on Google Books, Google News or Google Reader items, that would be reasonable. Amazon can just charge people automatically, or charge as a pre-paid model. Put some bandwidth credit on your Kindle account and you can see the pricing go down as you pull ebooks, news items, blog posts and whatever else should be available. This should also include all project Gutenberg content and whatever other sources for compatible content.

Not if you're in New Zealand - here, the standard casual data rate for mobile data is $9/MB. Yes, I do mean per megabyte - see the bottom plan on this page.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

No love on my iPaq (mobile IE) or my LG Dare browser (java-based, whatever it is). Blank screens ahoy. It only works on my PC.

[astrodad]

Originally Posted by Andybaby

per meg on cell phones is ussually $10

Is that for the Kindle? Many new phones now have data plans for $20 or so a month with "virtually" unlimited bandwidth.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by erayd

Not if you're in New Zealand - here, the standard casual data rate for mobile data is $9/MB. Yes, I do mean per megabyte - see the bottom plan on this page.

I though USD 2.50 per MB that we have for that was a lot. For unlimited data you have to pay USD 25 per month.