But also as a bibliophile who’s packed up and crossed oceans for good more than once, I can attest to one of books’ major detriments: weight. So my interest was piqued to hear yesterday that Google has just made 1.5 million ebooks from Google Book Search available on mobile devices.

Now, as of now these are only books in the public domain, meaning pretty old stuff; I can’t say that I often have the urge on a train ride to work to peruse say, Beowulf. Also the transfer of older scanned books to text for easier reading on a cellphone can often result in a bit of a verbal mishmash, as the LA Times notes.  But it seems that Amazon.com is also on the case. They announced simultaneously that they are now working on making contemporary and out-of-print titles that are already digitized for the Kindle e-reader for access on mobile phones as well.

In the meanwhile,  for those too impatient to wait to read the latest airport novel without all the fuss of pages, Amazon is scheduled to unveil the latest version of Kindle on Monday.

After 4 years of field-testing, the MILLEE Project hopes to go big time in India. MILLEE - Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies – grew out of Matthew Kam’s doctoral thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. His idea was to use phones and educational computing to improve English language learning for children living in rural areas and in urban slums in India. In a recent interview at shareideas.org, Kam talked about teaching 8 to 14 year old Indian kids using mobile phones:

One particular challenge was the time and energy it took us to explain our earlier games to the kids. The games were unconsciously Western in their designs and didn’t match the expectations and experiences that rural kids have about games. We therefore studied the traditional village games that they play every day, and designed our subsequent games based on these village games. This has made a big difference in making our game designs more intuitive.

For anyone interested in game-and educational design, there are quite a bit of research papers available on their website. MILLEE is now in talks with mobile-phone companies about a possible sponsorships, and even are hoping to get funds from an Indian government program. US- telecommunications company Verizon has already provided them with seed money for investigating how to target Spanish-speaking immigrants in the U.S with their concept.