Yesterday Google announced to release 1.5 million books in the public domain optimized to be read on a small screen on http://books.google.com/m. That’s good news. Now I can access some of literature’s greatest works while waiting for the bus.
Unfortunately it seems to lack some of the most important classics in public domain. Ok, this is not representative. But out of four pd classics on my personal reading backlog the following three were not available:
- Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species
- Albert Einstein -Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen
- Shakespeare – Hamlet
Also the OCR (character recognition) does not seem to always work fine:
The abundance or feantmefs of this fupply too feems to depend more upon the former of thofe two circumftances… [randomly taken from Adam Smith An Inqury Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations]
There is room for improvement. But I am sure, additional classics will be added and OCR-problems will be ironed out quickly.
More: NY Times, Cnet, LA Times,
