If the New York City subway system has no practical means of delivering cell phone service in its tunnels, why are so many subway travelers gazing so intently at their cell phone screens? In all likelihood they’re reading one of the 1.5 million books that Google has just made available for download into such devices as the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1. The books are all public domain titles, meaning their copyright protection has lapsed. This according to Miguel Helft of the New York Times.

Amazon, too, is adapting its Kindle e-book library for distribution on mobile phones. Though the Kindle selection at about 230,000 titles is a fraction of Google’s, Helft thinks that “the public domain books available through Google Book Search are not likely to be the most popular titles, as they are older books for which copyrights have expired. In contrast, the Kindle library includes scores of newly released books, including many current best sellers.”

I’m sure many bibliophiles will take passionate exception to Helft’s suggestion that newer is better, and it will be fascinating to see how many obscure titles are downloaded – and which ones.3

Google’s scanning initiative drew a lot of fire, indeed a major lawsuit. The suit is behind us (settled), and we can look forward to counting 1.5 million blessings as this flood of displaced literature settles over us like a delicious blanket.

In his statement about the lawsuit settlement, Sergey Brin, co-founder and president of technology at Google declared,

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor. While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips.”

RC