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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 Betas Google Print
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
skynet.google.com is still in Alpha. hal.google.com might be a little closer, but it keeps calling me 'Dave' for some reason.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
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?
And find that the whole text was already available through Project Gutenburg? ;-)
Does anybody know if they're using texts from Guternburg for this? It'd be a good combination.
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!
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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...
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
The solution: write everything in goa'uld.
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++
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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.
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)
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.
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 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.
search mastering digital photography
search king lear