Google Books On The iPhone and G1 Is Almost Kindle-Like (And Real Mobile Kindle May Be Coming Soon) rightly raves about about the mobile version of Google Books. It works great on an iPhone (and it turns out the rumors about Kindle coming to the iPhone were right; see also my LRC post Kindle v. Netbook v. ePub, Bookworm and Stanza).
However, it turns out that you can only see “free” google books in mobile site. For example, on my iPhone I cannot see the 1907 Edith Nesbit book The Enchanted Castle in the mobile-optimized version of Google Books. (Try it even from a regular browser, from that mobile site, you’ll see what I mean.) However, if you go to the regular Google Books site, you can find and read the whole thing–even on an iPhone. You just can’t use the mobile-optimized version of Google Books to view it–even on a computer. So you can read the book on an iPhone, but not in a mobile-optimized format.
I suspect that Google did this because of copyright concerns, as part of their deal with publishers–perhaps it made them carve out something for mobile phones or platforms. It’s amazing how much copyright law distorts our entire economy.
