Amazon and Google Extend Their e-book Offerings to Mobile Phones

According to the latest news on the Web, Amazon is “working on making the titles for its popular e-book reader, the Kindle, available on a variety of mobile phones.” The latest version of Kindle, the electronic book reader, is expected to launch next week, and the company seems ready to make the books available for mobile phones as well.

According to an article on TechFlash, Drew Herdener, Amazon spokesman, stated, “Readers deserve a purpose built-device that makes reading e-books better than physical books. Our focus is to offer the world's best purpose built reading device with 3G wireless access to a massive selection of content that people want to read, including New Releases and the latest New York Times Bestsellers. We are also excited to offer Kindle books on a range of mobile phones - we are working on that now.”

The announcement regarding Amazon's plans with Kindle has been made the same day Google launched a mobile version of its Google Book Search, which grants users access to over 1.5 million available public domain books from US as well as to more than 500,000 books outside the US. The Google Book Search has the books categorized into different sections, including business, economics, adventure, travel and others.

Besides Google and Amazon’s, there are a lot of other services that make books available on mobile phones. For example, there is a wide variety of e-book apps for iPhone, which includes Stanza, eReader, Bookshelf, Classics and Iceberg.

As many of you know already, Kindle is a dedicated device used for reading books electronically. The recent announcement raises questions regarding the company's commitment to Kindle as a device. According to Brian Walker, e-commerce analyst for Forrester Research, “Amazon is interested in being viable long-term and selling more content. The Kindle as a device is less important to them.”

Smartphones might have similar functionality as reading book devices like Kindle has, but they are not expected to come as a replacement, at least not for the next few years. For the time being, it looks like Amazon plans on providing its e-book offerings for a variety of platforms.