Google announced yesterday that the scanned 1.5 million public domain books, which until now were available for PCs, can be accessed from mobile devices such as Apple’s iPhone and T-Mobile’s G1. “This is our first step, but it is an important step,” noted Frances Haugen, product manager for Google Book Search.

The new mobile feature will display text for each one of the books, which will allow users to download printed material and will make certain tasks easier, as the PC version only displayed scanned images of the book pages.

Another announcement, related to the one above, was also made yesterday by Amazon, which is working on making the Kindle’s content available on a series of mobile phones. The Kindle is Amazon’s extremely popular e-book reader, which offers close to 230,000 titles.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” stated Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon, adding that “We are working on that now.”

The main difference between the two offers is that while Google’s Book Search offers older books with expired copyrights, Kindle’s library brings many new releases, including several current best sellers.

Another important aspect is that mobile phones cannot even come close to the utility of a dedicated e-book reader. Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader have the advantage of providing a bigger screen and an easier access to the wanted content. Analysts compare the trend to the introduction of camera phones, which even though made a great impact on the market, did not manage to replace digital cameras.