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Searching for Books Using Android

Posted by jonathan at 8:47am EST on 11/17/2008

Google has been holding a few tricks up their sleeve and have been waiting to pull them out. It’s time.

Google’s Android product is a platform for mobile phones, a competitor would be Windows Mobile.

Google announced that they are rolling out some software which will allow Android-powered phones to search Google Books’ platform for physical books. It does it by utilizing the camera and built-in technology to detect the ISBN (International Serialized Book Number) of a book and, without even clicking the shutter, it will provide you options to search full text of the book.

This is a huge, HUGE, innovation. But it really brings me back to the days of education. Why would an everyday person need to search for a specific quote or line in a book? I certainly don’t have a need for it. Sure, while in school, this would have been an amazing tool to have in hand so I could easily find things in a book. But everyday application today, not so much for me. Within that context, how many students have Android-powered phones?

There are still the same limitations of Google Books Search, that not every single book ever written is indexed [yet]. Additional limitations include potential hiccups in the software. As the first release of the application, it’s bound to have a bug here or there.

But retrospectively looking at this product, did you ever think you would be able to search a book in front of you, with a device that fits in the palm of your hand? I certainly never imagined that.

This is just one product that I can see Google coming out with in the future. Let this be the start of a revolution [again] for mobile applications.

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No Responses to “Searching for Books Using Android”

  1. Phil Nash

    Nov 19th, 2008

    “Why would an everyday person need to search for a specific quote or line in a book?”

    I think you missed the point there somewhere! You wouldn’t just use it to search for lines you already knew were in the book, you could use it to search the book like you’d search the Internet. Say you had a book on Android, you could search it for “Book search” to find out where in the book you could read about how to search books (bit of a self referential argument there, but I couldn’t think of a better example!)

    I think that is pretty amazing!