Slashdot Mirror
Google's Library Up and Running
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Google Print results are beginning to appear on searches. For
those who don't know, Google has been scanning from libraries from some of the world's
greatest universities in order to compile a freely accessible online library. An easy way to turn up these results is to simply type "book", and then
whatever you want to search for.
For instance, book origin of species will turn up the
full text of Charles Darwin's controversial treatise. 20,000
leagues, Oliver Twist and Pride and
Prejudice and m o r e are all there in full.
It'll be interestin to see how publishers deal with this if demand for these
books declines. In the meantime, would anyone like to point out any good books?" Hopefully, Google can also start to index some books that are being released in the Creative Commons/alternative open licenses.
A lot of these books have been available online (and easily findable via search engines) for years, courtesy of Project Gutenberg and others. Granted, Google gives them a little higher profile, and maybe they'll be more accessible, but it's not like the publishers of Shakespeare and Stevenson are facing something really new here.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Not one of the linked titles contains the full text of the book! Each shows only a few pages.
From the "About Google Print" page:
(you can view the entirety of public domain books or, for books under copyright, just a few pages or in some cases, only the titles bibliographic data and brief snippets)
However, it seems to consider every title to be "under copyright". I mean, Romeo and Juliet is centuries old, and surely in the public domain. If it's considered copyrighted, then just about everything will be.
Anyway, if you want free e-texts, Project Gutenberg is a great resource.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
http://print.google.com/print?id=LDrPI52uFQsC&prev =http://print.google.com/print%3Fq%3D019283438X&pg =3&sig=stLCn4Uuh5uCKQVXgVetpjRD5T8
google the ISBM number of the book
If you go to Google and read about this project, you'll quickly notice that unless the books are in the public domain, you won't be able to read the entire book online. This purpose of the project is the enable people to quickly _find_ books, not read them entirely online. Once you've found a desired book by using Google, you'll most likely have to go to a library and check the book out or buy it...
Probably because it isn't just called the Holy Bible in the collection.
g +James&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=book+Kin
However, I'm pretty sure you were just trolling.... Otherwise you would look for a specific VERSION of the bible!
Any PalmOS device, plus Plucker for HTML and Weasel for text. Weasel's screen-wrap autoscroll is hands-down the best way I've ever found to read e-texts. Plucker's autoscroll isn't as pretty IMO.
Then there's of course the proprietary readers for DocBook and MobiPocket and I would guess PDF, although I haven't bothered with that.
I can carry about ten books on my 8MB Visor, which keeps me busy for quite awhile. Only problem is what to do during takeoff/landing--I usually carry a single dead tree while I'm at it. One book+one palm is reading material for a couple of weeks.
You are only half-correct. While they the database is freely searchable, you can't (fully) view the texts of copyrighted works -- you are only given access to a few pages of a given book.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Thanks for the info, but he wan't trolling. It was one of the first books I checked for and amazingly "bible" and "the bible" do not yeild the desired results either. It's a little surprising to have to be so specific for this particular book.
TW
Moreover the calculus book requires specialist typesetting, less of a problem nowadays but the average printing house isn't set up for printing sigmas.
That's why most textbooks nowadays are formatted using LaTeX. Besides, most printing houses for textbooks require camera-ready, so it's the author's problem to get those wacky symbols onto paper.
http://www.ebookwise.com/ebookwise/ebookwise1150.h tm
a mmer/?p=83398151
no serious readers reads from computer; they read it on pda or (more commonly) a dedicated device.
The ebookwise isn't a technological marvel, but it's cheap (129$) and relatively user-friendly. The 128 mb smartmedia cards (35$) hold about 150 ebooks.
Ebookwise is sturdy and intended for carrying around; it's a great form factor, with a rubbery outside. And yes, I've read it in the bathtub. http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogr
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I had thought that they were putting "books" online. Turns out they're just putting the ability to search through books online.
BTW, this came up when I hit next page too many times on "Origin of Species" who's original text, I presume, is not copyrighted.
TW
Try 'book king james version'. There's an 'Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha Bible'. Why that specific version, and not another?
*shrug* Google might know.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
You get used to reading from a small screen pretty quickly, though I was never one for getting headaches from staring at a monitor too long anyway.
steampunk web design
To read through an entire book, all you need to is start from the beginning. When you get to the last page it will display, search for a result found on that page, then continue the process. I just read the first 15 or so pages of Finnegans Wake this way. I'd continue further, but I value my sanity.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Hacking Google Print article on kuro5hin.org, explains how Google Print uses cookies to track your access and ensure you don't look at too many pages. Solution: acquire lots of cookies.
Firefox GreaseMonkey scripts -- scroll to "Google Butler"; it will make saving Google Print pages work without extra effort in Firefox.
I might be wrong about this, but I think that the copyright might be in relation to the text (appearing to) having been scanned from a book printed in 1996.
;-)
For Google to offer it for free would mean that they'd have to scan it from a printed source which is also out of copyright??
Well, I think that's the case....
Anyone who says they fully understand copyright is either a fool or a liar... or worse.
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Project Gutenberg's got it in plain text, which is better in almost every way.
I find the problem is that PDA screens are a bit crap. Not only that, but the feature wars between manufacturers tend to make them into constantly evolving geek toys (Sorry!). Useful, I'll admit, but not really a nice device to read a book on. I've been following the devopment of high contrast, high res EInk products such as this and it's only a matter of time before products appear which will give us crisp, 300 dpi high contrast displays (albeit at slow refresh rates) that consume miniscule amounts of power. That's when the eBook becomes a much more attractive proposition. Sony have a device up and running, but I don't think it's consumer ready yet. Soon....
What about Linux assembly language?
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/
Or, you can buy a printed version from here.
The next issue of Free Software Magazine will likely have a list of many of the good free books available.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Yeah, I'm a troll for stating the fact that USA is not the only country in the world.
FAQ entry on books with updated copyright dates
So there you go.
It's my understanding that they can't re-copyright the actual text. However, they can copyright the presentation, line editting, page breaks and whatnot. So you could take the actual text from them, you couldn't take the text in that presentation from them.
Fun huh?.
Kirby
I can order on from Amazon UK and have the books shipped over here, still only paying half the price of the same book over here.
Its price gouging plain and simple.
I have some of my own books going through the Google Print pipeline. Mine are copylefted, and in fact they're available as complete PDFs online, for free, so unlike many participating publishers, I didn't have any concerns about limiting access. In my Google Print account, I have a settings page that includes this:
- Percent browsable [ edit ]
I have it set to 100%, but presumably the publisher who owns the copyright on that edition of The Origin of Species has set theirs lower than 100%.Google protects your content by limiting the number of pages that are shown to users. Although users will be able to search over 100% of each book, you can set how much of each book will be shown using the edit link above. For example, setting the Percent browsable to 20% will allow a user to view up to 20 pages of a 100 page book each month.
% of book users can see: 100%
BTW, it looks like Google is bringing everything online slowly and gradually. For several months now, the status of my books has been
- Processed: your book has been scanned and the file has been sent to be processed and included in our index
At first it said that it would appear in the index in about two weeks, but then a few more months went by, and they changed the message so it no longer gave the ETA. Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing whether inclusion in the index really drives traffic to my site.Find free books.
The free market works when the consumers are, well, free to buy what they want. If people didn't have to have a specific textbook, the price would drop because there was competition. As it is now, professors dictate the textbooks, so the campus bookstores are able to charge whatever they want because they know people have to have the books.
You can get around this two ways. First, if you absolutely must have the most recent copy of the book because the professor is going to be suing problems from specific pages; get together with a bunch of classmates to chip in and buy the book. Then make copies of the problems the professor wants you to do. Or you could bypass the campus bookstore and get the book through an online retailer. Froogle is an excellent resource. And if you think you're good enough, you can get through the course without every buying a textbook. I've done it a bunch of times.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
That said, it's always better to reproduce from an early printing, and not a new printing, to avoid any question of copyright.
$20 to $30 to print a book? You gotta to be kidding. 0.10 a cents page? For that price I could go down to Kinkos and color photocopy it for cheaper and thats more than 4 colors. Those textboxes are probably $5 to $7 to produce. At $130 retail price, the professor is probably taking half or $50. My freshman calc class probably had 500 people in it, and there were 3 classes a day. 1500 students a semester, 3000 a year. $150,000 a year. Not bad for changing the questions every other year, so people have to buy a new book in order to complete the assignments. And I'm willing to bet the professor didn't even write questions but paid some grad student min wage to do it.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?