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Google Launches Google Print

Posted by samzenpus on from the even-more-searching dept.

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."

27 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. See also... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google Betas Google Print

    1. Re:See also... by mog007 · · Score: 4, Funny

      So we have the Internet, pictures, newsgroups, news articles, email, and now BOOKS?! Why doesn't Google just make a search engine capable of searching the ingredients of every brand of shampoo ever made? How about the specific line of slashcode that allows CmdrTaco to post dupes?

      If Google uses those idea I hope I get a kickback, I'd take Google stock.

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    2. Re:See also... by generic-man · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Google Sets came up with a list of common shampoo ingredients (?) after I seeded it with the four active ingredients in Pert Plus.

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  2. Musty Libraries a Thing of the Past? by mfh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
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    1. Re:Musty Libraries a Thing of the Past? by Shadow+Wrought · · Score: 4, Insightful
      ...libraries may have no books at all, only a small cube in the middle of it that wifis texts to people from their homes.

      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.

      --
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    2. Re:Musty Libraries a Thing of the Past? by Planky · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Musty Libraries a Thing of the Past? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Musty Libraries a Thing of the Past? by Psychotext · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No No NO! Some of us actually like musty old libraries. I dont know why but I have always felt a aura of knowledge when I walk into a good library and despite being a tech-head in every sense of the word I would be the last one standing to ensure they keep books in paper format - AND AS MANY AS POSSIBLE.

      I dont know... I just sit in front of these damn screens for so many hours. Nothing seems to go in anymore. I read document after document, online papers, articles, blogs. None of it seems to have the same weight as a decent book that I can read without distraction, whether that is in the corner of my house or a library quiet room. Maybe it's because half of the content out there is rubbish (Publishers actually do something you know!) or maybe it's just the format, but I really don't like electronic books.

      I'll live without it thank you, and I'll thank you to stay away from my musty books. This isn't progress!

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  3. hold up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    so many google features, why no porn.google.com? :o(

  4. Launched? by richcoder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I always thought that launched meant that the site was up and running? All I see is a FAQ page.

    1. Re:Launched? by iMaple · · Score: 4, Informative

      RTFF (FAQ) to use it just google normally.
      An example search for The time machine ?
      Time machine Shows the book.

      The pages are shown as images and u can read upto 3 pages in this case.

  5. Gutenberg by Ryan+Stortz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Will Google by any chance be using any of Project Gutenberg's texts?

    --
    Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
  6. Highly Useful by Eryximachus · · Score: 4, Funny

    I have always wanted to be able to grep a text when I was searching it for citations for an english paper.

  7. Copyright Concerns? by ravenspear · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Copyright Concerns? by moonbender · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Judging by the FAQ, publishers send books to Google to get them scanned and indexed. I assume that when they send their books, they also agree to give Google a license to use the materials in the way described.

      That said, I'm still curious how this will work out. There are many issues. For one, it will have to gain a critical mass of books to be more than a novelty. And if it really works as described above, they rely on others to bring books to them. With anyone else, I'd be very sceptical, but Google does have the sheer brand power to actually get publishers to send in books. On the other hand, maybe sent in books are just part of it and they also index books out of their own volition, which as you said brings up copyright concerns.
      If that works out, I'm curious to see how they will enforce the viewing limitations. It says that you'll be able to view the two pages before and after the one you found. It also says it records data to track which books you've already seen, assumingly to prevent you from seeing more than those 5 or another number of pages of any book, ever. It does not say whether or not you're required to log in an account, but that would seem to be the only way to prevent people from simply refusing a cookie or clearing them to see another 5 pages. Of course, Google is using accounts for most of it's add-on services, at least as an option, but I think it'd be a first for an account required to gain access to a certain search engine feature.
      And of course even with accounts, they wouldn't be very safe at all from malignent users, who could run multiple accounts, or groups of users who pool their pages to get the whole thing. Granted, it would take many users and more importantly a lot of time to get a 300 page novel, but groups working together to violate copyrights using an enormous amount of technical know-how are hardly new to the Internet. It's probably simpler to just scan and OCR the whole thing yourself, though.

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  8. camel by mrpuffypants · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. Example... by tommertron · · Score: 4, Informative
    In case anyone wants a real live example:

    http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie =utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=mastering+digital+photograph y

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    Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
  10. Google really does know its business by ShatteredDream · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  11. A Plagiarist's Dilemma by lavar78 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  12. The publishers are adamantly against this by j.+andrew+rogers · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the standpoint of the publishers (and my girlfriend is a national sales manager for one of the very large publishers), this idea is incredibly bad and they have been extremely resistant to it. Amazon has been trying to push this for years without success, and it seems that now Google is getting in on the game. Or maybe Amazon is trying to use Google as additional weight to try and break the stubbornness of the publishers.

    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.

    1. Re:The publishers are adamantly against this by sparkmanC · · Score: 5, Interesting

      prove to Amazon and themselves that it actually eats sales rather than driving them

      Actually, having books online for browsing increases sales. Just think about going to the book store and paging through a book before you buy it... You are much less likely to buy a book that is shrink-wrapped, because you have no idea of the quality of the book.

  13. Re:Good for google... by jerometremblay · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  14. Re:great... by el-spectre · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?)

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  15. See for your self by mishmash · · Score: 5, Informative

    Click here to see some google print results.

    --
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  16. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  17. FAQ #5 -- Google's DRM for your web browser by yeremein · · Score: 4, Informative
    From the FAQ:
    5. 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. (emphasis added)

    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 .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).

    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...
  18. Re:Google is really stretching it ... by Lshmael · · Score: 5, Informative

    But for anyone doing more than storing recipes, you need a proper desktop search engine, or even just an email search engine.

    And of course, your endorsement of aforementioned products would not have anything to do with being the CEO of the company that makes them, right?