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Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search:

Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search:

Today, we're making it possible for anyone with an Android or an iPhone to find and read more than 1.5 million public domain books in the US (more than half a million outside the US) in the Google Book Search index for free on their mobile phone, from anywhere with Internet access. It's possible for a commuter on a passenger train to read classics like Pride and Prejudice right along with lesser known works like Novels and Letters of Jane Austen, or for a student in India to read Shakespeare's "Hamlet" on her iPhone, all via a simple website accessible from your mobile phone.

So far, the mobile edition only offers browser-based access (Web-style scrolling, no offline access, no remember-my-place), but an interesting addition to the emerging and important mobile reading space. Screenshot below (or click here if you can't see the screenshot).

Google will be at next week's TOC Conference talking about the past, present and future of GBS.

Related Stories:

• ReadWriteWeb: "Google Book Search Goes Mobile"
• Connecting the Dots Between Google Book Search and Android
• Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
• Magazines Now in Google Book Search
• Google Book Search: It's All About the Index

Alan Mutter has an incisive analysis explaining why an all-digital strategy would be unacceptably painful for the majority of established newspapers:

In what many of us thought was a slightly bizarre case, the New York Times Co. has settled with GateHouse Media in a suit attempting to cease the automated aggregation of Gatehouse content on Boston.com's affiliated properties (Boston.com is owned by the Times Co.). It is not clear why the settlement was reached, since precedence was on the side of the Times' operation.

Via Publishers Weekly, Amazon announced Monday it will stop offering ebooks in formats other than Kindle and Mobipocket:

In the future, the online retailer says it plans to offer only e-books in the Kindle format (for wireless download to its Kindle reading device) and the Mobipocket format, both of which are owned by Amazon.

Lev Grossman takes a pragmatic look at the changing state of authors, readers, and the definition of publishing:

Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.

In an essay catalyzed by YouTube's removal of a film criticism archive, which included ripped clips from copyrighted movies, Matt Zoller Seitz addresses the disconnect between takedown policies and the gray areas of digital culture:

A judge has dismissed lawsuits from Amazon and Overstock.com challenging New York's "Amazon tax," which was enacted last year. From the Associated Press:

The law applies to companies that don't have offices in New York, but have at least one person in the state who works as an online agent -- someone who links to a Web site and receives commissions for related sales.

In an article covering the Palm Pre mobile device, Ars Technica makes a very important point about how devices utilize network connectivity, and what the assumptions are underlying their models of data storage and access:

Fortune Magazine has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt about Google's relationship with newspapers:

Maybe their time [newspapers'] has just come and gone?