Now read your favourite books on your mobile, courtesy Amazon and Google

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.

E Book ReaderGoogle 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.