Slashdot Mirror
Google Launches Google Print
Rescate writes "As reported by Reuters,Google is launching Google Print, which will show book excerpts next to regular Google search results. A spokesman said, "We're trying to index every book there is, and make it searchable for our users." Even though this competes with Amazon's A9 search which also searches within books, Google says the two companies will continue to work together, and that Google Print will link to Amazon, as well as other sellers, to buy books listed in the search results. Google will demonstrate the technology Thursday, Oct. 7 at the Frankfurt Book Fair."
Google Betas Google Print
'Nuff said.
as if spammers didn't have enough sources of digital literature to randomly append to the end of emails, now they have excerpts of most books- and in text format (presumably, its google) instead of Amazon's picture formats.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Google is really reaching for markets now. ...
What's next? - Google searching our hard drive? Oh wait
Google will demonstrate the technology Thursday, Oct. 7 at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Now there is a clever piece of irony. Google is pioneering toward a paperless library and they show it off at a book fair. Authors will surely love this technology while publishers might not like it if it makes them redundant. How many of you remember the musty smell of an old library filled with books? Today's libraries have improved, yet tomorrow's libraries may have no books at all, only a small cube in the middle of it that wifis texts to people from their homes. It's only a matter of time before we don't need to scan thousands of pages to write papers (or even learn something for that matter), and it will make everyone much more productive and intelligent. Publishers have pretty much accepted electronic book formats, so what's wrong with the RIAA and the MPAA?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
so many google features, why no porn.google.com? :o(
I always thought that launched meant that the site was up and running? All I see is a FAQ page.
Will Google by any chance be using any of Project Gutenberg's texts?
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
I have always wanted to be able to grep a text when I was searching it for citations for an english paper.
but what does it do for me? If I'm intrested in a book I go to amazon and a few other shops if I don't find it there. They have this search box on amazon, which is handy for finding what I need. Kind of like google, only on the site itself and on their database itself showing me how much they still have in stock, etc.
I don't know, it just seems so reduntant to be able to do this on google as well now.
They could already be using Project Gutenberg for tons of material. I doubt this will really affect them much.
What kind of copyright concerns among publishers will this cause? I know Amazon received some opposition to their service and it seems that this is a step up from that. At least on Amazon the content was only available on one site and most people would probably come across it when looking to buy the book or ones similar to it. But with this, you could have copyrighted content suddenly becoming accessible on millions of searches from anywhere.
Is it possible, while this is very cool, that google is getting to diverse to support its core business. Searching the internet for the best results.
i want the entire oreilly catalog on there right now.
I know it's already all in digital format, it's just a matter of emailing it to google.
go, tim, go.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie =utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=mastering+digital+photograph y
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
The service is already available. Try searching for war and peace (no quotes). There will be separate link with books icon. Click on it and you can view book pages!!!
Project Gutenberg isn't useful to Google because they display picture of every page. You can even see the book covers.
Other tech and IP companies could really stand to learn from Google. They took what was originally a niche market and they have built it up and brought that market into new areas. One of the best things that Google did was make their search features customizable for individual websites. They aren't the first to do this, but they have been very good at making it fit in well with the websites that want to add search capabilities.
Now what would be really sweet would be for Google to convince the music and movie industries to let it index song lyrics and movie scripts. That would be just another nail in the coffin for Google's competitors and it probably wouldn't be that difficult to do.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
especially the idea to share ad revenue with publishers
it seems they are going to succeed again
Google Print Mirror
It's funny, laugh.
Can I read an entire book online? No, afraid not. Google Print is designed to help you discover books, not read them from start to finish. It's like going to a bookstore and browsing - only with a Google twist. Google searches across entire books in order to find the pages that are most relevant to your search. Once you're on a book page, you can 'flip' two pages forward and back, view other information about the book and even conduct another search within the book.
Doesn't this mean that you could search for each page, download the next two pages, search two pages after that, and download the next two pages, etc until you have the whole book? I'm sure a script could be written that could download an entire book for you very easily..
On one hand, this is going to make it much easier for plagiarists. OTOH, it's going to make it much easier to catch them.
"Dave, I stand still--the conclusions jump to me!" - Bill McNeal, NewsRadio
The problem, ultimately, is that showing the page you are looking for, plus or minus two pages, is often all the pages you need to see for a great many bookes e.g. books that are randomly accessed in a reference fashion. As an example of this, my girlfriend routinely searches cookbooks online using this very feature. It shows her the recipe she was looking for from an expensive cookbook, and plus or minus a couple pages, which means she gets the entire recipes -- the primary benefit of the book -- online for free. And she uses this as an example of why her publishing houses won't participate.
For STM publishers and similar, 90% of their product line could be used this way. Letting Amazon (or Google) give away book content in a searchable format five pages at a time would dramatically eat into their sales without generating any revenue. Most of the books you do see in this system are either 1) books from minor publishers too stupid to have thought this through, or 2) a very short list of throwaway books from major publishers to prove to Amazon and themselves that it actually eats sales rather than driving them -- the consensus of the publishing industry. It would have died a long time ago except that it is the pet project of someone high up in Amazon.
Hmm while they own googlecanada.com they have failed to secure other such domains like googlejapan.com, googlechina.com, googleindia.com, googlebrazil.com.
My guess is they may want those sites someday.
It seems that Google, Amazon, et. al. are really pushing the envelope when it comes to the availability of information. The ability to search through books digitally, regardless of copyright infringment, is just one more step of centralizing the computer as the sole portal of information. While libraries and other brick and mortar organizations are certainly not fading into oblivion anytime soon, it is really encouraging to see further social progression of the use and importance of computers. The more that the computer can become integrated into social functions, as opposed to the "novelty toy" it has been for so many of the populace since it's creation, the more we can expect to see even more creative innovations and developments of the PC itself.
Google is really good at organizing online data. But this seems wrong, they're organizing offline data, to "tease" online users with. If anything, this should be an extension of froogle, not a seperate search functionality.
No... you CAN'T read a book through this.
From Google Print's FAQ:
Can I read an entire book online?
No, afraid not. Google Print is designed to help you discover books, not read them from start to finish. It's like going to a bookstore and browsing - only with a Google twist. Google searches across entire books in order to find the pages that are most relevant to your search. Once you're on a book page, you can 'flip' two pages forward and back, view other information about the book and even conduct another search within the book.
got sig?
Watch out!
Its just a distraction to take our attention off of gbrowser.com!!
HAHA! nice try though.
"Can I read an entire book online?
// steal book
No, afraid not. Google Print is designed to help you discover books, not read them from start to finish. It's like going to a bookstore and browsing - only with a Google twist. Google searches across entire books in order to find the pages that are most relevant to your search. Once you're on a book page, you can 'flip' two pages forward and back, view other information about the book and even conduct another search within the book."
string sentance = "We assume that";
string book;
google.search(sentance);
for(book += google.scrape())
{
google.search(sentance);
sentance = google.lastSentance();
}
Google's turning to junk, trying to do too much, spreading itself thin in desperation to show good numbers each quarter for GOOG investors!
Google will go down hill from here!
One could say that Google has a monopoly on web search technology. With Google launching all these different services, aint they using that monopoly in one market to enter another? Isn't that against anti-trust laws? Isn't that was the Microsoft case was all about?
How we know is more important than what we know.
First it was the web, then usenet, then everyones email, and now the sum of our written words as well.
My God, how long until it is sentient?
I personally welcome our google overlords.
(I use my Gmail account exclusively now, and my domain mail is blind forwarded to it, I just LOVE the interface).
What, me worry?
Click here to see some google print results.
UK Laptops
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Ah yes. I want my google search results in print format. Absolutely brilliant.
(for the humor impaired, the above is a joke)
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Step 1: search google for some phrase and find a book with that phrase somewhere in it ...
Step 2: go two pages in each direction and find another word on those pages; download all pages viewed to hard drive
Step 3: re-search for those two terms and go back to step 2.
Step 4: repeat until entire book has been spidered
Step 5:
Step 6: profit???
If google were interested in following "Don't be evil", wouldn't they make this feature a seperate search form, rather than placing their advertisements right in the middle of my search results?
Maybe I just misunderstand.. Correct me if I'm wrong
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Using it once in awhile will get you a pi/2 % (1.57%) discount on all Amazon.com purchases. Yeah it's puny, but it's something.
The example seems phony. I couldnt see any google links to the pages in the book.
GOOG is now on Nasdaq, creating fluff whenever possible!
The whole point of search engines is to index publically available information. If I click on a link and have to pay to see the match of my search, the power of casual research on Internet is gone.
Let them put that in sponsored results if they want, but I don't think anyone will buy the stuff.How do I know the books is good if I can not look at portions of it I consider important in a bookstore?
http://www.google.com/alerts
Mod Parent Down Goatx
Goatx?
Are you some kind of goat fetish freak?
whats wrong with you parent was already modded down didn't you see the -1 troll jesus christ, heres a gmail invite:
7 d7 629-8883e220a3
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-4ebce9d08d-56f8
haha lol @ gnaa
It seems to be pretty random whether it works or not. It worked for me this time, but earlier I tried this same link and it didn't. I've had similar results performing my own searches. Perhaps some of their servers aren't running the book search code or something.
They still have a few issues to iron out, certainly. For example, if you find a book and then search it for "the" you can often recreate almost the entire book, using the two-page grace to fill in the few pages that don't contain the word. I suspect you could fill the rest in by searching for more common words such as the prepositions, "and", "but" etc.
(Posting anonymous to avoid wiping earlier moderations.)
So google wil pay for the scanning. Must be a great contract for whatever place does the scanning. I wonder who? Or do you think google does it themselves?
OK, I know that google says on the FAQ that the ability to print and copy images on their book pages is disabled, and if you re-enable the context menu, you just get a clear 1 by 1 image if you try to copy it, but it makes it pretty pointless if you can just go to view->source, find this section:
n t?id=[really long semi-gibberish name]")"
".theimg { background-image:url("http://print.google.com/pri
and copy the url, obtaining a plain image that you can do whatever you want with... uhm, within the law, of course!
-
Google for Mastering Digital Photography and you'll see a Google Print link up front. The page is shown as a graphic, with search hits highlighted in yellow. Google somehow (probably a though a CSS hack) manages to substitute a 1x1 white pixel
I'm not sure I like this. This is fairly innocuous (they can't stop a screen capture), but it still bothers me a bit that a company whose motto is "Do No Evil" is dabbling in DRM...
There are two obvious attacks on this system. The first is automatable, and just involves searching for common words like "the", "and" and "but" and scraping the results to work out which pages you're getting. Keep on at it until you have every page (or at least every page you are interested in) and you can rebuild an entire chapter or even an entire book locally. Since the highlighting is predictable it would be trivial to have a mapping from the highlight colors to the non-highlight colors.
The second attack is an interactive one, useful if you just want to read a chapter onscreen. What you do is find some way of finding the first, second or third page of the chapter (an exercise for the reader) and then use excerpts from page+2 to shift your "viewing margin" along each time you hit the limit.
Google can't get away with this, surely?
I actually preferred Amazon's default search algorithm before they introduced "Search Inside the Book", because it limited its searches to the bibliographic data. Now when I do a search I get lots of books that contain the words I'm searching for, but that's not usually what I want. Annoying, and I have to go to the advanced search page for what I want.
I think keeping Google's Web index separate from the Print index is a good thing, based on this experience.
EricWhy the Vioxx recall is good for Google
One of the problems I have with reading books is that I'm so used to using my PC to augment my memory (that is, I use search instead of remembering things), that when I read a book and come across a name, I instinctively want to Ctrl-F it to find the last occurence so I can fill my short-term memory with backstory on that character.
Fortunately, amazon.com has full-text searching that gives you the page number of your query, making finding the last occurance super easy.
Now we have this. Awesome++
Unless one has a truly excellent bookstore in the 'hood, it is difficult to browse by subject and discover books which one likes. One can do an on-line catalog search, or use Amazon's technology which finds clusters of related material, but these are limited in their efficacy. One thing I really, really like is citeseer (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs), which identifies works which are similar (at the sentence level). The only shortcoming is that citeseer's domain is academic works. If Google manages to obtain the entire published corpus, then this sort of search will be possible within a much broader domain, and will (I assure you) lead me to purchase many more books.
I'm starting to become very tired of reading Slashdot with Google-press releases.
I welcome the idea of another search-company coming out of nowhere ( just like google did ) and taking the market by storm.
Google has had the spotlight for far too long, and the recent IPO gives me a bad feeling where Google is headed by the investors interests.
After about 20 pages... 5 clicks in the table of context, the cover, index and perhaps two actual pages of content:
Thank you for using Google Print.
You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.
Google protects works that are under copyright by restricting access to certain pages and restricting the number of pages you can view. You may continue to take advantage of Google Print by clicking on About this Book. Thank you for using Google Print.
If someone from Google is reading this:
There are plenty of books that are out of print with no copyright restrictions on them. Since google has plenty of resources and aims to put all available information in the hands of users, would they please consider putting up the entire text of such books online? (Since there is no copyright on these books, there should be no '2 page backward -2 page forward' restrictions on them.)
It would be awesome since there are some really great books which one cannot purchase anymore since they are out of print (unless you are really lucky and find them on eBay). Having Google put up full text versions (or pdf versions) would be the ultimate feature.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
I'm as big as a technology geek as any other (maybe more so), but nothing beats the nostalgic smell of the book and flipping through it's crisp, perfect pages. I like the musty smell of old libraries. I, for one, do not welcome our paperless book publishing overlords.
I'm reading the Foundations novels in a PDA and can read them at any time, and it's very fun, I would have read them in paper but this is much easier to carry, no heavy bags and stuff. And I can read in the boring part of a class and no one notices it, etc...
I have already read "I robot", "the end of eternity" and a few others.
So I do think ebooks extends to novels and the like. It's just that you need young eyes to like it.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
From the FAQ:
What can I do with books that I find?
Well, you can browse a few pages, learn more about the topics explored by the book, buy it, or commit a selection to memory. To further protect your book content, printing and image copying functions are disabled on all Google Print content pages.
Everyone seems to be assuming that the book text will be there on the page as plain text. Nope -- it looks like it will be an image, and Google will be putting in whatever tech they can to prevent you from saving or printing that image. You could retype it yourself, but of course (as parent poster mentioned) if your teacher is suspicious you *know* they'll be able to bust your ass with a simple search on Google.
Does anyone know how they're planning to stop saving or printing the page? I'm hoping they've tested this with Firefox (since more and more "regular" people are using it); I know there's an option to prevent websites from controlling the context menu, which is the standard method of stopping image downloading -- this is a standard FireFox option, with no special plugins.
And I'd like to see them try to stop people hitting PrtScn, then pasting in Word, MS Paint, whatever. Even my dad knows how to do that.
How completely useless. I searched for 8 different books that I would consider fairly well renowned, and it only found 1 of them. Pffft. I'd expect it to hit 70% before it becomes useful.
... if copyright hadn't been corrupted by the wealthy. If every book older than seven years was online and indexed, the Web would be a revolutionary breakthrough rather than an advertising cesspool.
~ rich peeps sux
Google is on their way to being the holder of all the information making up the modern world.
First it was the web, then usenet, then everyones email, and now the sum of our written words as well.
Ah, but see, Google still isn't evil. Microsoft is evil, because they use their position to establish lock-in -- producing services that don't interoperate and so forth. However, Google just makes better systems than their competitors. Google has no exclusive deals or access that would prevent anyone from setting up a web server somewhere on the Internet (Possible exception: the Deja newsgroup archive -- while news posts are public, I don't believe that anyone has been archiving posts for as long as Deja has). I could set up a Google competitor tomorrow. They don't establish barriers to entry -- they just make such a good set of products that nobody can compete.
May we never see th
Project Gutenberg already does this.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as if Google can search Gutenberg texts. In this case, you could always download the texts from Gutenberg and index them yourself. Gutenberg texts have expired copyrights.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
I was fumbling around with a mac mouse in a lab the other day and found some cool stuff about google.
Basically with my ineptitude to use the one button mouse I accidently clicked on some whitespace in gmail or something and got to a login screen. I took a note of the URL so that I could post it on slashdot, but didn't keep up with my notes after my story got rejected.
I logged in with my gmail info and was given access to the google store (really cool) and google answers (google answers is already known about). Also "Google in your language" where native speakers of $language can earn brownie points or something for translating google into their native tongue. Google's SOAP API documentation was also stored here, as well as user management for AdWords and Google Groups.
You can access it now from www.google.com/accounts, but the link that I got from clicking around randomly in gmail was way different, and my gmail account worked without registering a google account, and then 10 minutes later it stopped working completely.
I am the publisher of a few computer books. My books do participate in the Amazon "Search Inside the Book Program" v.2 and I think it's great. At first I thought this Google program was great too, but then I realized something.
For me, it seems that it would be better to just take the entire texts of my books and post them onto my own website. Then, I would get the ad revenue from Google adwords placed on my site, and I would potentially let more customers see my site (which has lots of info besides the books).
If I let Google serve the books, then they get the revenue from showing the ads, and I "lose" that hook into my site (since a person searching for a term in my book would see it from Google not from me).
Then again, there are two other things to think about here:
1. I wonder if regular www.google.com searches will show this stuff, or if you'll have to specifically go to print.google.com. (Similar to groups.google today.)
2. The other advantage to Google hosting it is that they'll most likely have some kind of copy protection or IP protection that would be better that what I'd have on my site if I just posted the text. Brian
Here's the URL of the image, obtained by view source:
3 &img=1&q=mastering+digital+photography&sig=gv2nFpt Ef0dj7Gzb8eZ4U8UdtUo
3 &img=1
4 &img=1
http://print.google.com/print?id=ULQSG0Zs7vcC&pg=
If you don't want the highlighting, then:
http://print.google.com/print?id=ULQSG0Zs7vcC&pg=
If you want page 4:
http://print.google.com/print?id=ULQSG0Zs7vcC&pg=
If you have cookies disabled and change pg=4 to some other page numbers, some do work (e.g. 4-15, 17-25), and some don't (503 Forbidden).
It seems likely that publishers will not let google store entire books in their database, unless some URL obfuscation mechanism is devised to prevent collecting entire books by URL guessing.
They also may track by IP address, because after trying many of the above pg=n URLs, now I get a lot of 52x52 Image Not Available GIFs, even for URLs which *previously* worked!
Here's a Python script to retrieve the "protected" images from a Google Print page. Enjoy. :-)
I'm from Frankfurt and was at the book fair yesterday. I'll be there today and there is no sign where exactly this press confernce of google will be.
There is no entry in the events-database.
And google's press slav^wspokesman does not respond to calls. They could do better.
I could do better to find that press conference...
Any suggestions?
I wonder if this will make it easier to determine if a document (essay/term paper/thesis) contains plagiarized text?
vk.
This sounds like a job for the Proxomitron. All we need is someone who knows about these things to write a suitable site-specific filter, and it'll all be automatically 'fixed' for us. I'm sure there's plenty of people here who, with a few minutes thought, could post working code for us to paste into our filter files.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
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Apparently it is not possible to search yet.
So, how will the search result be ranked ??
I hope they will use something similar to an eigenpool
IIRC, it's been awhile - they had the pdf's of the books right there for you to buy on the spot. That would be a real revolution, much more so than an offer to buy the dead tree edition. Presto, I can get information in a few seconds that is of high quality.
Google may have enough cash just to -buy- a major book publisher and move forward with this idea.
..don't panic
search mastering digital photography
search king lear
In a simultaneous announcement Jim Bloggs of bookz inc. unveils the new distributed reading project which puts together and distributes books for free using a large number of independent readers. "Our goal is five minutes from Google to error-free distribution of an entire book over the Internet."
Jim could not say how Google Print could prevent it. "Relax and it won't hurt so much" he added.
What can they do that some piece of software accessed via a web browser can't?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... hath here spoken.
Lets the past rest in peace. And inneficiency.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Any screen capture software can get that, no matter what the browser allows you to do or not.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Somebody else will publish a book that provides the same or similar information.
They will get the exposure. They will get the money Google gives them. And they will sell more books (a nicely, professsionaly finished product will most of the time be better than a few pages printed in normal paper in an inkjet printer).
What your girlfriend's company should be doing is begging Google to include all their books on their service.
TIme will tell, but normally those that oposse new technologies are doomed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Forbes also has an article about this.
Anyway, Google is being totally half-assed. Picking up a really old idea and adding some political correctness is crap. They are big enough and smart enough to be able to do away with that, just deal with publishers who see the light and see how fast it grows.
Google should be making a system like that described in Heinlein's book Friday, search for the phrase (if you can) "feed the elephant". It was describing a terminal that had unlimited access (for a steep fee obviously) to just about any kind of research, which you could then follow via links and graph data against that found in other documents, etc. To get that far will need a semantic-aware web or maybe a markup language for graphs, but certainly Google ought to be able to put together a consortium of the publishers who are willing to try it for a flat fee. Of course all those books that don't make it to your local bookstore, and all those pages were likely in a digital file at one point. Could you imagine what it would be like to be able to do any kind of cross-referencing, searching, READING, and ANNOTATING (for yourself or your group) say the entire Library of Congress and beyond? How about all science journals regardless of where they were published? Conference proceedings, meeting minutes. It would be for now like the Internet was for me when I was 12 (25 years ago), a misty word heard floating on the air, but try as I could, I could never find out how to get online (well eventually I did through the Source i.e. compuserve).
No, it would be even more incredible, because it would include all the words people have agonized over and spent years of their lives to put in the right order. Maybe some of us already do a little of that for fun with their own files. Personally I think there is a case for fair use (if I buy the same thing once, twice, three times over the years I darn well ought to be able to use a digital version), there is a case for usage on the premises of public libraries and probably also within their cyber-precinct online, and then there is a case for total information awareness of all high-qualiy information sources, so long as people get paid for their products, there should be a way to get past all the red tape and "feed the elephant's child" i.e. free the mind to roam through knowledge.
Here is an excerpt from Robert A. Heinlein's neat novel, "Friday".