Workers Leaving the Googleplex from Andrew Norman Wilson on Vimeo.

What does Google and the book Brave New World have in common? They both have classes with each having separate accommodations. The top of the Google class gets ski trips, free food, holiday bonuses, etc. The classes are distinguished by the color badge that is associated with their name.

Google has bought some interesting companies in the past like Feedburner and YouTube, but I must admit reCAPTCHA is one of the more boring acquisitions. For those of you that are unaware about what reCAPTCHA does, the technology displays a random set of characters that humans must type in to verify that we’re not a spam bot. Surely the technology is useful, but the technology just creates extra steps for humans to accomplish what they want to do right away.

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) finds random words and text from scanned newspapers and books and since the text degraded over time in the scanned documents, spam bots have a hard time deciphering them. Now reCAPTCHA will be integrating this service into Google products to increase fraud and spam protection.

The technology used by reCAPTCHA’s Optical Character Recognition will also be used on the Google Book Search project. The OCR software built by reCAPTCHA will be able to search for text within the books that Google scans. The reCAPTCHA team will now be working for Google. The announcement was made by reCAPTCHA co-founder Luis von Ahn and Google Product Manager Will Cathcart on the Google Blog.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) started a massive project to scan books from university libraries all over the world.  The project has been successful for the most part with the exception of facing litigation from a few publishers.   The main point of the project was to make books more accessible to people in order to level the playing field for the spread of knowledge.

Viresh Ratnakar, Guillaume Poncin, Brandon Badger, and Frances Haugen wrote on the Google Blog that one of the greatest things about iPhones and the Android is that we are able to play games and watch videos while waiting in the post office line (ironically I was doing just that last week so I can relate).  But sometimes “we year for something more.”  This is why the Google Book Search team has created  a platform that allows us to read books right from our phone.  That’s right, Google Book Search has gone mobile with over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the U.S.

Best of all these books have been optimized to read on a small device.  This makes me question whether this was an effort to take on the Kindle directly.  After all it is rumored that Amazon has sold at least a million of those things.  By making millions of books available to anyone with a mobile device for free, why buy a Kindle?

The biggest advantage of the Kindle is that books are downloaded on the device.  The Internet is not required to read books like it is for Google Book Search.  The Kindle is ideal for use on airplanes.  I don’t know about everyone else, but I get most of my reading done when flying the friendly skies.   I think the only thing stopping me from buying the Kindle is the $359 starting price.  And when Google throws books at me for free… to go… It makes me want to buy the Kindle less.  What are your thoughts?

[via Google Book Search blog]