The portfolio consists of 1.5 million free books that are in the public domain (ie out of copyright), which normally means pretty old, or “classics” if you’re an optimist. Copyright is hugely complicated and varies from country to country, but a rough rule of thumb is that books are in copyright for the author’s life plus 70 years – so writers who died pre-1939 generally speaking. So you won’t find John Grishams or Stephenie Meyers, but there’s a rich cornucopia of Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Mark Twain (no relation to Shania), which should keep you busy for a while.

I had a bit of a read of Dickens’s Hard Times last night (and you thought we had it tough) and it works pretty well as a reader, though it’s no comparison to the real thing – the Kindle – or the old real thing, a book. You can’t download it per se, just view it online, 15 pages at a time, which means that the size of the screen means an awful lot of scrolling down. It would also be hard to read a whole book in snack sessions, as it would mean a little bit of clumsy navigation to return to your place every time. I think that could be a little irritating.

Having said that, Dickens especially, lends itself well to snack reading as he wrote most of his novels in installments, not books. This means that each chapter builds to a crescendo, designed to get you to originally buy the next one and these days, navigate to the next chapter. This led to a famous real scene in the US where the quay was lined with people waiting to hear the news of Little Nell, the desperately ill heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop. As the ship approached the harbour, it was hailed with shouts of “What news of Little Nell???!!”.

She died, by the way.

Anyway, back to Book Search. Strangely, given the parent of the project, the one main criticism I have of it is that it’s actually not very good for ummm…searching for a book – or displaying its wares for discovery either.

As far as discovery is concerned, there’s a category called “Featured Books”, which in principle should be used to whet your appetite for hidden gems or popular choices. In reality, the same 5 books are featured every time you visit the page or refresh it, or click the “Load More” button.

In search, books are presented pretty randomly – or perhaps I couldn’t see a pattern – with critiques of works often ranked higher than the original book, as an example. Maybe it’s in order of popularity of download so far and maybe lots of English majors use the service, swatting up for exams. But it seems unlikely.

Finally, and I don’t want to be picky, but an awful lot of books that are free and available online aren’t available for mobile. So the 1.5 million books used in the headline is rather misleading at this stage. I’m assuming (and hoping) that they’ve rushed out to market with a very limited selection at this stage and will be adding to the portfolio on an ongoing basis.

Having said that, the logical approach would be to load popular works first, and then round out the portfolio. This doesn’t seem to be the case, with some really obscure stuff already there and some great works unavailable for mobile at the moment. We should be told.

So, nice one, Google. Thanks for what we have so far, I’m sure I’ll be using it from time to time and I look forward to enjoying it get better.

So much so, that we launched a new series of ad formats specially for the iPhone about a month ago. You can see very short videos of the formats put through their paces here. But if you don’t have the time, the iPhone has allowed us to create advertising that is uniquely mobile, such as touching a banner to watch a trailer for a forthcoming film, or go to the Apple Apps Store or iTunes, or click to call.

This is important as any new medium tends to adopt the formats that preceded them. So when TV came along, as an example, early ads were black-and-white still pictures with a voice over, which was a hangover from the radio days. It was only later that ads emerged that aspired to be some of the mini works of art that was produced by the likes of Guinness, Honda and Apple, to name just a few over the years.

In this way, early mobile ads tended to take the banner campaigns of the PC web and shrink them down to mobile size.

Many of us believed that this was only the first step and sure enough, the iPhone has enabled us to take the second. Sure, you can still see the PC roots, but they’re quite clearly now made-for-mobile and we’re really on our way as a new industry. Early results show phenomenal promise in terms of interaction with the consumer too, who are voting with their fingers in this case.

At the Mobile Web Europe conference I was speaking at this week, this was one of the ideas that I covered. So I was interested to hear that JumpTap (white label mobile search) say that while the iPhone accounted for 2% of handsets, it also accounted for 50% of mobile searches. While this seems very high to me, I do believe that it’s certainly indicative of the real state of affairs.

It’s too early to say if the iPhone will be a long term winner, or just a very important influencer of the market. But it is certainly a major milestone in mobile advertising and Search too, by the sound of it.

Personally, I wouldn’t buy one, especially as, like many people who got bit by the shiny-shiny bug in the last month or so, I already have an iPhone. Obviously, I’d like to put it through its paces and will read reviews with interest, but that’s different from forking out the loot.

Will you be buying one soon? Please leave a comment and let us know.