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Google Inc. is inviting avid readers of the world to curl up with a good cellphone.

The Internet search leader announced today it is making more than 500,000 books already in the public domain available for free to smart-phone users through a mobile version of its Google Book Search website. Readers in the United States will have access to more than 1.5 million books through the service.

Through a new mobile site – books.google.com/m – users can search for and read full books on select Web-enabled cellphones.

Still, mobile users will only have access to a fraction of Google's rapidly expanding digital library to start: Google has already digitized more than 7 million books through its Google Book Search service. Most of the titles have passed into the public domain, but some are still under copyright. The collection includes the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

“We founded Google Book Search on the premise that anyone, anywhere, any time should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture,” the company said in a statement. “We want people to be able to search and read the books we've digitized anywhere – not just when they happen to be at a computer.”

The new service works on Google's G1 Android phone, Apple Inc.'s iPhone, select devices from Nokia Corp. and other “webkit” phones that use open-source architecture as the foundation for their Web browsers.

In October, Google agreed to pay $125-million (U.S.) as part of settlements in two lawsuits brought against it by the Association of American publishers and the Authors Guild. The two organizations filed suits against the Mountain View, Calif., company, accusing the technology titan of copyright infringement when Google launched its book scanning and digitizing efforts in 2004.

As part of that settlement, Google agreed to spend $34.5-million to create a “Book Rights Registry” – a system similar to those used by organizations representing songwriters musicians – that would ensure authors are properly compensated for their works. Google also agreed to a payment structure for authors whose works the company had already digitized.