The time has come for books to conquer the Internet, or rather: for the Internet to conquer literature. The Amazon Kindle and the combination of the iPhone and Google Books Mobile represent only the beginning.

Book reading on the Net 1: The Kindle 2

The Kindle book reader has been a tremendous success for Amazon.

Now there is a new incarnation available, the Kindle 2: smaller, a bit sexier, with a high resolution screen for pleasant reading and a new text-to-speech feature that lets it read the books out loud for you.

It includes a 3G wireless, so you can download ebooks directly for Amazon. There are over 230,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs available.

Book reading on the Net 2: Google Books Mobile and the iPhone

Last week Google made its book search service available for mobile phones — for the time being for Apple iPhones and Android cell phones (as well as for the iPod Touch).

The main difference between the web based book search feature and the mobile one, is that Google Books Mobile will present books as plain text, not as scanned images. This makes it possible to download freely available books to your mobile phone and read them on your go.

This only applies to public domain books. For copyrighted works you will have to do with excerpts as before.

However, there are as many as 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US), so there should be enough to keep you busy for the foreseeable future.

We are not there yet, but…

We believe the Kindle and the Google Book/iPhone combination represent the start of the era of the electronic book, and era that can be compared to the digitalization of music and the switch from physical storage (LP/CD/MC) to computer files.

Neither the Kindle nor Google Books on an iPhone can be compared to the combination of online music stores and MP3-players — yet.

The Kindle will only read files from Amazon, and you can not use the reader for other ebook formats or — for that matter — use it to surf the web.

The iPhone (and the iPod Touch) works amazingly well as a web browsing device, and you can read any PDF file or text file available on the Net, but the screen is still too small for pleasant extended reading. Moreover, the screen resolution is too low. You need the resolution of a Kindle to match reading a paper book.

Still, the two devices have opened up the door to online reading, and the pressure towards innovation in this field is enormous.

The main players: Amazon, Apple and Google

It is only a matter of time before someone is able to present a tablet reader that combines the web surfing capabilities of an iPhone with the high quality book and newspaper reading functionality of the Kindle.

And the main contestants are Apple: (“the iTablet?”) and Amazon (“Kindle 3, the Web Browser”?).

Moreover, Google has prepared for this for several years now. They plan to make Google Books the default search tool for both finding, buying and downloading books and magazines.

This is going to be exciting. Watch this spot!

Here’s a video presentation of the Kindle 2.

Kyle Browness has made a short presentation of Google Books for mobile phones:

Google Book search for mobile phones can be found at books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile/