Interfaces galore for mobile devices: DCPL and NYPL lead charge toward mobile designs for public library sites and catalogs; Google enables phone-based Book Search.(infotech)

On February 5 Google announced a mobile-optimized Book Search interface making it easy for users with certain phones to access 1.5 million public domain books scanned by Google partner libraries.

Using optical character recognition (OCR), the content of these "free books" will be available through the mobile site as reflowable plain text, along with the option to view the original scanned page images in the event of errors in the OCR-scanned text. Though the interface only works on the iPhone and smartphones running Google's own Android mobile platform, Google rep Jennie Johnson said, "Ultimately, we envision a future where people across the globe can search, discover, and …