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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Actually, you CAN.
Example:
I search for the book, go to the first page. I then download/save the next two pages. Then, I search for a line of text on the second page, go to that page, and then have the NEXT two pages available to me. If I keep doing this, I can read the entire book, although it may take a while.
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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."
http://www.google.com/alerts
Google Sets came up with a list of common shampoo ingredients (?) after I seeded it with the four active ingredients in Pert Plus.
For more information, click here.
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.
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)
Well of course it would :) I wasn't bothering to pretend otherwise, just pointing out there is a need for such products and giving examples of ones that exist. Others exist as well, but I think ours are pretty good. So shoot me !