Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Google Books Excitement....okay, maybe the excitement part is just me.

As my last post may have hinted to, I have a slight obsession with Google and Google applications. I will openly admit I have spent hours looking through Google images, playing with Google Earth, searching Google Books, and numerous other Google related things.

Various debates have arose over the value of things such as Kindle and Google Books. I personally enjoy the searchability, convenience, and accessibility of Google Books, and find myself wishing more books were digitally available. Like many of my classmates I have yet to jump on the Kindle bandwagon, however I do think it creates a new element of accessibility which is never a bad thing.

Similar to some of the ideas behind the portable Kindle, Google Book Search recently became available on cellphones. Initially, the digitization quality of most books was not high enough to be viewed on cellphone screens. This problem has apparently been resolved and you can now access Google Books via your cellphone. Unlike Kindle or Sony Reader Digital Book, you do have to be using your cellphone's internet access to use Google Books. Despite this potential drawback, this new facet of Google Books does open up the large number of digitized books to a large number of users who primary means of accessing the internet is through their cellphone. This is not the first web application google has made available to cellphone users. Currently, cellphone users can use Google Latitude to locate their friends in real time, use Voice Search to look things up, and various other applications depending on the users phone.

1 comment:

Ruthann said...

So stalking just got easier?