How to Read Free Ebooks on Your Phone

Each and every page in the standard edition of Google Book Search shows up as the scanned image of that particular page in a book. Some of them even have notes in the margins or underlined words. Not all of the books are free to read, so sometimes you only get a brief snippet of a book.

Mobile Book Search

Mobile book search is different. Each and every book in Google Book Search for mobile is free and complete. They're taken from public domain books, and there are over 1.5 million free titles available in the US. (There are half a million available outside the US where copyright law may vary.)

The Google Book Search phone interface is available at books.google.com/m.

Instead of showing an image of each page, the mobile edition shows plain text extracted from that page using an automatic process called OCR (optical character recognition.) This text is much easier to read on a phone.

Troubleshooting Funky Text

OCR isn't perfect. If you run into a problem and the text looks garbled, tap on your screen. The original page image will appear.

As of this writing, Google Book Search is available in a mobile interface for iPhones and Android phones. But don't sweat it if you don't have one of these phones. You can download and read free eBooks from your computer desktop, too.