With the world becoming increasingly technology-dependant, many today find curling up with a  favourite book an anachronism. Instead, they prefer their daily dose of literary pleasure through e-books on laptops. Consequently, the e-book reader market is growing rapidly with Amazon supposedly having sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008.

Google now aims to take on the likes of Kindle and Sony eReader with the launch of Mobile Book Search. Google utilizes Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to provide screen friendly text from scanned pages.

"What if you could also access literature's greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone? Or, some of the more obscure gems such as Mark Twain's hilarious travelogue, Roughing It?" members of Google's Search Mobile team wrote in the blog post. "Today, we are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US).

The Internet search giant, in a post on Thursday on the Google Book Search blog, said mobile versions of the books could be read on devices such as the Apple iPhone or T-Mobile G1, which is powered by Google's Android software.

"These new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen," Google said. "With this launch, we believe that we've taken an important step toward more universal access to books."

To access the mobile version of Google Book Search a user needs to type http://books.google.com/ into the Web browser of their iPhone or Android phone.

Google has just settled a 3 year lawsuit with authors and publishers over scanning and including books in its search. Because of this, Google has set up a site for authors to claim copyright over their books. This may mean that recently released books will soon be included in the mobile version of Book Search.

Google is still trying to sort the imperfections present in the text. Firstly, the works are not paginated. Moreover, the user also needs to be connected to the Internet in order to make use of this service. In a blog post, a member of the Google team has stated, ''The technical challenges are daunting, but we'll continue to make enhancements to our OCR and book structure extraction technologies.''

Amazon is also planning to make its online store of e-books for the Kindle available on mobile phones, the New York Times reported on Friday.

"We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones," Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, told the Times. "We are working on that now." The Amazon spokesman did not provide any further details.

Google will initially only be offering books in the public domain - those which are not under copyright - for mobile phones. Amazon, on the other hand, offers the latest releases and 230,000 titles in all, including 103 of the 112 current New York Times bestsellers.