Good news folks! Google is ready for you to download over a million of digital books in EPUB format that can conform to the mobile screen sizes. The books you get to download from Google, many are no longer under copyright law. As the way Google puts it, converting atoms to bits — it’s a great thing since the bits world is much much more affordable! Imagine of all those trees you’ve saved by using electronic copies of the books. Imagine how much more affordable for the schools to allow students to download a literature than printing it.
Ready to download some books and get on with your reading? No problem, just visit http://books.google.com/.
The process of getting digital books to work with different mobile devices was not easy, but Google have done it! You can read all about it at here. Many digital books are in PDF and other image-like formats, but those formats are great for computer screen’s sizes, but when come to mobile devices, the books’ image-like digital formats aren’t so great for the readers! One way to go around it is to extract words from images, but how to do that? Google is using Optical Character Recognition method to do so. Though as Google puts it, smudges on physical pages, fancy fonts, and many annoyances that bound to physical world can be tough to extract even though Optical Character Recognition is designed for this very task. Google is trying its best to improve Optical Character Recognition technology, and in doing so there will be more books in Google’s digital library for you to enjoy!
Vinh Nguyen
