Slashdot Mirror
Google Betas Google Print
Chronic Infection writes "Google is beta testing a book search service called
Google Print. Here is a list of books included to date." Quick spot checking turned up excerpts like this one for The DaVinci Code, a great book if you haven't read it.
Quote from Google Print FAQ: During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites.
Now I wonder how this is done. Google's PageRank uses links from other pages to rank results - but in usual books there aren't any "hyperlinks".
Could anyone offer me insight into this? - thanks!
"...a great book if you haven't read it."
I cant resist asking:
So how great is it if you did read it?
This is simply amazing. First it's amazing that publishers are allowing such a thing. It's also amazing to imagine what we only be in the immediate future for all of us. Knowledge at our fingertips, from web sites, and now from online books whose publishers realize that many, many people will read parts online but will want to purchase a dead tree to read the whole book.
I know Amazon did this first, but I love to see Google taking up the idea. Google is simply my favorite company in the world. They don't take crap from (mostly) anyone, and they run Linux across the board. They are an undeniable force.
It may be risky, but I for one will be investing in Google the moment they release their stock. This is a terrific company and the people that are running it are terrifically smart!
This is definitely a step in the right directions, but it's just that - a step. I'd really love to have access to a digital library (d.l.) in much the same I have access to one in the real world. I wonder if Ben Franklin came under as severe commercial pressure as those who are trying to push for a digital library available to all?
"If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit." - Mitch Hedberg
Most of the alleged "excerpts" are nothing of the sort. They're just bibliographic entries.
This would be a really useful service if they could distinguish between the books that have *actual* excerpts and those which just had descriptions, TOCs, etc.
Not really related to Google directly, but still useful. In a user .css file (you can specify it in IE's accessibility options or Opera, or use userContent.css in your Mozilla/Firebird profile chrome directory): .readerImage {
display: inline !important;
}
That's it. Really simple.
Currently there are 52 books in this database. (Use this google search)
But it is an interesting idea. And might yield more useful results for information seeing as the bar for publishing a book is a little higher than getting a webpage listed in google.
...another step to sentience. Don't tell me I didn't warn you when Google starts taking over the world and starts creating robotic assassins...
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
At this point, we all know Google uses pigeonrank technology.
While your post might have been valid a few years ago, ever since Google told us the real secret, it's hard to believe some people still think they use all those fancy algorithms and hyperlinkers.
Isn't this a dupe from about a week ago?
Wow, you obviously haven't read the book. It has absolutely nothing to do with the so-called "Bible Code," which I'll agree is utter rubbish. "The daVinci Code" is fiction...so I suppose you're right, it's not true.
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums...
I am a Jedi Apprentice
"Using full-color photos from Star Wars: Episode II, I Am a Jedi Apprentice explains to younger fans what it's like to be a Jedi apprentice."
I don't care about ads to buy crap books online. I wish someone would do something about making available books that AREN'T available for sale any more instead.
Does that imply that if you have read it, that it's not a great book?
I guess you didn't read the book. It has absolutely nothing to do with ELS sequences.
But dont let the facts get in the way of your rambling...
On the first Slashdot search, I see 9990, of which a few aren't books. In your search I see 6530, although after page 9 it says stuff is repeated, so maybe there's only 900+ books. Regardless, many more than 52 or 53.
The DaVinci Code is not really all that good. The basic premise is fascinating, and the euthor may or may not be very knowledgeable about his subject matter, but the story itself is just too full with very tired thriller cliches - I mean, a six-foot tall Albino as the immediate villain? Please. /Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Google has been slowly adding features for years. Google groups
used to be dejanews. Google answers, google taskbar (includes pop up
blocker), image search, catalogue.
What could google add in the future? It has to be add supported,
not upset their current advertisers and be somthing they could do well.
Look out iTunes et al if google ever starts selling music.
Google movies if the MPAA ever descided to sell films online
for a resonable cost.
Google instant messenger.
I just looked at the excerpt of "The Partner, Large Print Edition" but unfortunately the font was the same as for all the other books.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I can't deal with the clumsiness and poor results of Google anymore...and now Google's everywhere.
They were not as detailed as this or as comprehensive but if this actually gets going, it will be an incredible aid to researchers. Currently, only about a small percentage of the information I use is on the web. Most of it is in libraries and research collections and is difficult to access.
This will provide information on which books and papers (if periodicals are included) I need to start getting a hold of for my research.
Man, students these days have it easy!
Out of all the wonderful passages in the Bible, they only included the Inside Flap. Although everyone I know always has a copy somewhere, but - come on - give us more!!! Holy Bible Excerpt
============
Mathematics will always come back to hunt you down, in so many ways
is available with a particularly phrased Google search.
When I read it in STORY SUMMARY.
The author, Dan Brown, doesn't know squat about the subject for which he writes. As far as good read? It was entertaining, brain candy. One dimensional characters, but he did do a decent job of creating a conspiracy that will translate well into a hollywood "blockbuster" directed by Ron Howard.
As far as his research into religious and historical matters he just plain sucks. He basically takes everything from a book that was a total failure from few years ago called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" by a guy named Baigent. Just to show you how much Brown loves this guys nonsense take one of the main characters for instant --- Teabing. Baigent, Teabing, Baigent, Teabing...??? Seeing a connection? Anagram.
Yea thats right asshole before you go waisting more space like the dickhead above make sure it's useful before posting
I have much more e-books downloaded from p2p. (around 10,000). I should make my own book search engine. :)
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
The DaVinci Code has been on the bestseller stand at the bookstore I work at for a while now, so it must be good, right? right, which would mean Ann Coulter has something worth reading...
(actually, I'm happy to say she's been kicked off by the likes of Al Franken, Molly Ivins, and Michael Moore. go my friends!)
-- haaz.
I count 558 books, but maybe I am searching wrong. How can I get the 900 plus count? What is the url? Thanks in advance!
There seems to be a new google section popping up every other day. What ever happened to the days when people actually know how to use a search engine with advanced searches.
with amazon, google etc venturing into this business..
How do these book excerpts aid the plagiarist?
Um, ok 'The Bible Code' and 'The Da Vinci Code' are very different books. The Da Vinci code is not a book that claims that the bible holds secret messages about the future. It is more of a michael crichton-style murder-mystery that brings up a lot of ideas about the bible and religion that most people have not thought of. It does not claim to be a book of facts, more a new spin on topics that really cannot be proven one way or another. It is definatly a worthwhile read, if you are open to the posibility that maybe, just maybe the bible is not a completly factual record.
I have, and really, it's not that great of a book. What makes it a bestseller is that it provides new insights into the Catholic Church, and, in the course of the fiction story, weaves in a good nonfiction tale.
It really is fascinating reading, like proclaiming that the Holy Grail, long thought to be a chalice (see Monty Python and the Holy Grail) is actually the remains of Mary Magdalene, and the quest to find her remains and to pray by them. It also says that with Mary's remains, there are boxes of old documents with proof that the Church was involved in a conspiracy, made Mary out as whore when really she might have been Jesus's wife.
IMHO, I think this book was designed as a nonfiction book first (the story of Mary, etc) and then the fiction part was made up, so to help burn away the ire of the Catholic Church. I hear this book caused quite a stir in the Vatican. The thing that might have saved it was probably that it was styled as a fiction book.
If you want to read some interesting insights into the Catholic Church, read this book. If you're looking for a good fiction title, forget it. You're better off acquiring a copy of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen or something else from the classics.
Questia's "47,000 books and 375,000 journal, magazine, and newspaper articles"
The DaVinci Code is pretty much like a literary Irwin Allen disaster flick, but less entertaining. Find yourself a copy of Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Same ground is covered, much more entertaining.
No slashdot effect?
soon I'll be able to find that lost sock after washing clothes on google.
I agree with the majority of posters: The Da Vinci Code sucks. At its core, it's a trite, predictable murder mystery -- though some easily-impressed readers seem dazzled by the author's very superficial use religious/mystical imagery.
For the real thing, you want to check out Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose (the book, not the film).
The Davinci code formula: 1) Use fictional characters to present speculative nonsense about real people and organizations as "proven historical fact". 2) Sell millions of copies to suckers who know nothing about church history or serious Biblical scholarship and don't know how absurd the whole premise really is. 3) Profit! With much thanks to the educational system for more or less eliminating history from the curriculum.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I know we're not supposed to gripe about rejected stories, but I posted ALL of this including the Google beta links more than 10 days ago.
2003-12-17 23:47:32 Move Over Amazon, Make way for Google (articles,news) (rejected)
The Google Print FAQ has some vague prose about "experimenting with online content", but no specifics beyond this little search experiment. Which just duplicates a similar feature at Amazon. Bringing the Google search engine to bear isn't that big a deal -- what use is page ranking when nobody can directly link the pages?
It's significant that the main Google Print page just has an "Intentionally Left Blank" message. Obviously this project wasn't meant to go public yet. Apparently Google wants to integrate all this legacy content with the web, but for once they're totally out of their depth. It's pretty naive to not account for the total aversion of media companies to any electronic distribution of their content.
I have read every Dan Brown book and many Jane Austen books. I don't know why I feel like a pussy when I tell people that I love Jane Austen stories, probably because they are all pretty much the same chick-flick kind of story: a lower-middle class adolescent woman in fear of becoming a spinster finds the right man but he does not reciprocate the interest, so she suffers in silence rather than confess her love for him and when proposed marriage from another well-to-do man, even if it puts her, undeservingly, in the right spot of society, rejects it because her principles do not allow for her to enter into a loveless marriage but it all ends up okay, because the man she loves comes around in the end. Tweak a few details, like in P&P, and you have a Jane Austen story to be sure.
Dan Brown's best book, IMHO, is Digital Fortress. I read it one night between 11:30 and 6:00 AM. I couldn't put it down. It will DEFINITELY cater to this crowd - it's really a great book. If you want to get into DB, I recommend you read them in order - Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, and Davinci.
If you're looking for Grail lore - check out Holy Blood, Holy Grail. If you're looking for incredible stories about the Catholic Church, check out The Christ Conpiracy.
All, of course, my two cents.
Questia does somthing similar--they've digitized ~60,000 books, chosen by a panel of librarians for their scholarly value (mostly liberal arts titles), and allow full-text searches of the entire library. Questia is marketed as a tool for writing research papers--the service keeps track of what books you've looked at and will automatically build a bibliography and do your citations for you in the format of your choice.
They use an indexing system similar to Google's to keep full-text searches of the library in the sub 1 second range, and the whole thing is pretty slick. Searches are free, and they show the book, publishing info, and the page number of the search result. To actually see the text, though, you have to be a subscriber.
Footnotes and citations are live-linked to their referenced sources, if those sources are in the Questia library, and every book is stored in XML, which keeps the original pagination (including illustrations). A neat side-effect of the XML tagging is that you can search for implicit things (like themes or genre or subgenre) as well as explicit things (keywords). Questia spent the better part of two years securing the rights of each and every book on the service, but it really is a cool idea.
Disclaimer--I worked for Questia for a couple of years, although I left in 2001.
i read the excerpt from The Da Vinci Code. seems like a fun book. but what are "numeraries"?
It's hard to tell yet, but the first book I looked at had less information than a libraries card catalog entry would.
That qualifies as advertising. If that happens often, I won't bother to look at them.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Mmmmm... Palestinian Baby Blood Cookies.
My dad read the book and he said it was quite good.
I started reading it and got about quarter of the way through before I quit.
It's on a nearby table now. I might tackle it again...
If you read the google information for publishers, they seem to want only publishers who publish a LARGE amount of content each year.
If you are a self-published author, you can pretty much forget about your book or books being covered. Likewise if you are a seller of old, out-of-copyright works, antiquarian books, etc.
This space available.
in your search, like this:
Search for Book without Google Print
I just come to realize that there are approx 800+ books available in Google Print. Why don't they also cache the books and book lists from The Online Books Page at Penn Library (~20000+ listings)? They have links to books like: Relativity HTML or Gutenberg text by Albert Einstein, Bibles 94 items found, etc...
============
Mathematics will always come back to hunt you down, in so many ways
To create a work of fiction that deliberately and blatantly mispresents the facts - as all the packaging of the Davinci Code and Stigmata are designed to do - is at best irresponsible, and at worst pure evil. Both include supplimentary material (in DC, a forward, in Stigmata an afterword) designed to make the reader think that their story lines are quite close to the truth, all the while hiding behind the shield of being "fiction". It's like a movie that is "based on a true story" that resembles the true story only in the names of the main characters.
In fact, it's quite hard to defend the Davinci Code. The whole book is little more than pure fantasy, yet the first page of the book goes out of its way to point out that Opus Dei and the Priory of Zion are real organizations - without pointing out that there is no reason to think his interpretation of the Holy Grail is in any way connected to them. (Inciudentally, in the latter case existence itself is quite a questionable assertion.) That is, it deliberately muddies the line between truth and fiction in order to create the impression that the situations of the book are real even when though the story itself is fictional. For those who lack the background or the skills to do the research to do discover what a crock it is, this functions as a lie.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
This book is absolute drivel. The cliffhangers are especially geared towards "young readers" - they hang for about three paragraphs (don't want to strain your brain), then its back to the one-dimensional "brilliant idiot" characters and laughable (and now very old and tired) conspiracy theory plot that hasn't been new since the 60s.
The author's "research" which many have praised so highly, that is his new "insight" into the Catholic Church and its history, is mostly bunk.
/. ) take it to be entirely credible.
.
The scary thing is that many intelligent persons (like many who frequent
Please read the following for a closer and harder look at the "research" behind the Da Vinci Code . .
Dismantling The Da Vinci Code
IC XC NIKA
Sort of like calling "Chariots of the Gods" a good history book.
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From the article:
I hope nobody needs to have that pointed out to them! Nice to see that Google's taking a hand in making it slightly less true, though.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
This is less properly described as "book search", than as "book advertisement service". In other words, that's all excerpts in that list of "books".
Are you adequate?
Yeah, read a novel for that hard hitting scholarship. /me rolls eyes.