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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."
They could already be using Project Gutenberg for tons of material. I doubt this will really affect them much.
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've thought about this before as well. I think the two things that libraries do have going for them are those who cannot afford net connections themselves, and the fact that reading something on paper is still easier than reading something on the screen. Of course Xerox's e-paper could also take care of the latter while free net connections could take of the former, thus allowing your prediction to come true faster than I would think.
There are many out there, myself included, who will never get rid of books. They are just too cool to ever be fully rid of. Of course if there is some type of massive paper famine in a couple years or so, that will change I'm sure, but I have a very hard time parting with any of my books.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I believe books themselves will never die, ebooks are great as a delivery service and are incredibly useful for research - but it won't ever extend to novels and the like. So certain aspects of the libraries we know today wont exist - but a large part of it will.
especially the idea to share ad revenue with publishers
it seems they are going to succeed again
Actually, from a small university press point of view, I think this technology is great. Sure, you can see a few pages from one of our books, but if the subject is interesting and the book is useful, we're hoping people buy the whole thing. This doesn't make us redundant, it gives us another way to market books. Since many of our books are very specialized, (think monograph), it can be difficult to get them to the people who need the information.
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..
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.
Why should you consult different places to search for different kinds of data? What google tries to achieve is to be your Unique Source of Answers, your first and last stop.
One single unified interface to find anything you might think of. This is the ultimate goal of Google.
It's good for the user because it's easy to learn.
It's even better for Google, who litteraly ends up re-branding the whole world.
nonsense... Do you have any idea how easy it would be to write a random (but still using real words) text generator? A few lines in your scripting language of choice should be enough.
Or should we also stop using text for the content on web pages? Should slashdot convert all text to PNGs?
(and how long until OCR makes that useless anyway?)
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
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.
When we get rid of books there will be nothing to prove something did or didn't happen. someone could change history on Googles index and we wouldn't have anything to prove it wrong.
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?
This is a standard example of a disruptive technology. It introduces so many changes in the distribution model that publishers can't see a way to make a profit out of it.
There are many ways to go around the problems described in the message from the publisher, but all of them require a re-thinking of the publishing business and their economic model.
You don't describe a very good value proposition being offered by the publishers. Books of the sort you describe sound like they will very easily be replaced by some kind of computer reference.
How many dead tree encyclopedia's are being sold these days?
Google seems to be pretty good at killing stupid business models, so I for one look forward to watching these particular dinosaurs die.
Surely though this is the minority case and is fairly unique to reference books, which have already had their market pretty much hammered by the web anyway. I'd say that many many people would just keep googling until they found the recipe they wanted and would never be in the market for a recipe book themselves anyway.
As a self-appointed expert in these areas I would imagine that recipe book purchases are in fact a lifestyle purchase - people buy them because they a) look great on their kitchen shelves, b) have a picture of some sleek cooking goddess like Nigella who you might like to give it to over the sink, etc. etc. Can't imagine many people rush out and buy them in order to get a recipe for making salmon souffle.
On the other hand I read a lot of history and this would positively make me buy more books - triggered by a relevant excert I saw on the web. No way would I read a big history book on a computer. I don't buy encyclopedias, recipe books or dictionaries anyway.
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Why wait a week? Just read the excerpt on the content page. Or get the book off your shelf (yes, it can include books that you already have). Or go to the library and get the book. Or have Amazon overnight it.
. html ), these aren't "advertisements;" they're actual excerpts and descriptions of the book. It might even contain the info that you want (e.g. a quotation). The advertisements are on the side (left rather than right) of the linked page just like always. The book results may be useless to you, but they aren't "evil."
If you RTFL ( http://print.google.com/googleprint/about_example
Why would O'Rielly kill off their Safari service?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Yes, but spectacularly badly. So badly in fact, that in practice most people don't do it. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are pursuing desktop search because they realize just what a chasm there is between a "proper" search engine, and what's available right now for personal search.
If you've only got a few dozen docs and a few hundred emails, then you don't have a problem. But for anyone doing more than storing recipes, you need a proper desktop search engine, or even just an email search engine. Don't make the misteak of thinking both Google and Microsoft are way off base here -- it's something they know about.
That's about 50x more effort then checking the book out from the library and photocopying it, or downloading the text form your favorite p2p network (most popular novels are available).
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
hmm, google seems to be pretty good at determining what you were searching for even if you spell it incorrectly (and sometimes by a wild margin). i wonder if they would simply not need to correct the mistakes made by off-the-shelf OCR software for the purpose of indexing. Project Gutenberg exists so that people can read full texts and so a good amount of accuracy is important, it doesn't seem like that's Google's intention here.
Google somehow (probably a though a CSS hack) manages to substitute a 1x1 white pixel .GIF file for the page if you try to print it or copy its location. They also disable the browser's context menu on the entire page (not just over the image), although Mozilla can deny it the right to do that (Prefs | Advanced | Scripts & Plugins).
First, they set display:none; on the containing div for media:print. Second, the image is a css background-image, which may be hard to grab with the context menu. (and you can't simply turn off CSS to avoid the display:none;)
You can view-source and get the URL there, of course.
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
I wonder if this will make it easier to determine if a document (essay/term paper/thesis) contains plagiarized text?
vk.
But how are they going to enforce this limit, as well as disabling cut and paste and saving?
Cookies and javascript hardly qualify as secure technology. Browser certificates? That could be circumvented by having multiple concurrent browser installations.
What they'd really need would be their own browser, maybe..?
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