Google gives access to 1.5 million books on iPhone and Android

Google has opened up its selection of 1.5 million public domain e-books to iPhone and Android users. The books, which are part of a project dedicated to scanning millions of literature's greatest works, were first made available to PC users on Google's Book Search.

Google had to prepare its PDF scans to support mobile devices, and it did so by utilizing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies that were improved by the company to read typed and hand-written manuscripts. If the OCR technology hasn't correctly processed a page, users can view the original scanned page image provided by Google. Users can view the Mobile Books browser by visiting http://books.google.com/m. [via InsideGoogleBookSearch]