Google Book Search has just announced that it’s made 1.5 million public-domain books easily readable on mobile devices, such as the iPhone. The book were already scanned and available at Google Books but could be hard to view on tiny screens. As always, access is free.

The main page for the mobile books is here.

The announcement is on Inside Google Book Search here.

If there’s a public-domain book that you’d like to read online and/or have as a PDF, and a physical copy is in the Boston Public Library, just request a scan via OpenLibrary.org and it’ll happen within days for free. We live in amazing times, people.

{via PublicDomainReprints.org Blog}

Public Domain Archive and Reprints Service is “an experimental non-commercial project to archive and re-publish public domain works.”

Let’s say you’re going through the more than half-a-million public-domain books available as PDFs at Google Books and the Internet Archive, and - being from the old school - you think how great it would be to have a certain rare old book in actual book form: a printed, bound, softcover object you can hold. This service lets you do that. They say the price ranges from $5 to $19.

[ADDED:] Almost 4 million different titles can be printed this way.

{via Open Access News}