Google mobile book reader launched
Takes on Amazon's Kindle with phone friendly classics

By Stuart Miles writing at Pocket-Lint.

Google has announced that it plans to take on ebook readers such as Amazon's Kindle and Sony's eReader with the launch of a mobile version of its Google Book Search service.

From today, users wanting to read any of the 1.5 million books currently available on the service can now do so by visiting a mobile friendly version of the site that has been optimised for all mobile phones, but in particular the Apple iPhone and the Google backed G1 Android handset from T-Mobile. "If you use Google Book Search, you'll notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books.

These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone's small screen", Viresh Ratnakar, Guillaume Poncin, Brandon Badger, and Frances Haugen, of the Book Search Mobile team said on one of the company's blogs, explaining why we haven't seen a mobile version before.

The full story here.