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.

Comments

textbooks

[TedCheshireAcad]

It would be great if textbooks were on there. $120 is too much for a calculus book.

Re:textbooks

[Silver Sloth]

I'm sure this is going to be an unpopular viewpoint and may get modded flamebait but I've seen the other side of achedemic publishing.

The problem with pricing on text books is the very limited market. Even if Proffessor Plum sells a copy to every student on his course he will only sell ~100 per year. Compare and contrast with the thousends of copies sold of the average novel. Moreover the calculus book requires specialist typesetting, less of a problem nowadays but the average printing house isn't set up for printing sigmas. All these force the price up.

Just because students are poor(ish) doesn't mean that they can be excempt from market forces.

Re:textbooks

[bcrowell]

Quit using your class to sell your textbook.
Stop and think for a second. How do you think any textbook gets written for the first time? Do you think the publisher has a bunch of mathematicians sitting in the basement, waiting to be ordered to write their next textbook? No, sorry, the only people who are competent to write a good textbook are people who are actually teaching the subject, and once they've written it, it needs to be tested on real students, just like software needs to be tested before it's released. This has been going on forever. It used to be that the professor would run off an initial draft of his book on a mimeograph machine and sell it in the bookstore. The modern equivalent is to put it up on your web page for your students to download in pdf format.

Of course there's a conflict of interest if the book is not available to the professor's own students for free in digital form. That's completely unethical.

In fact, you didn't even make any stunning breakthroughs in the field of undergraduate integration and derivation, so quit writing a new version every year!
Actually, accrediting organizations won't let schools use books that are more than a certain age (5 years, IIRC), and they don't care if it's a rapidly changing field like astronomy molecular biology, or a slowly changing one like freshman calculus. The publishers do tend to work on a time scale that's even shorter than that, typically 3 years, and yes, their motivation is to kill off the used book market. If it bothers you, just buy the old edition used. Some of the homework problems will of course have been renumbered, and you'll have to figure out the numbers by comparing with the new edition.

You also need to realize that very few professors make any significant amount of money from textbooks. The only textbooks that are really profitable (enough to buy a vacation home, etc.) are a few of the really big-selling books that are used at lots and lots of schools (e.g., Halliday and Resnick's physics text). Nearly all of of the difference between the $20-30 cost of paper, printing and binding (for a four-color book) and the $130 retail price is eaten up by the publisher. Some of that is legitimate (it costs money for editors, salespeople, etc.), and some is just pure greed and inefficiency. (My mother used to work for McGraw Hill, and when there'd be a big meeting in New York with the corporate bigwigs, she said they always showed up to the meeting in stretch limos. Pretty pathetic.)

Re:textbooks

[momoe]

As a new PhD in molecular genetics and evolutionary biology (not yet a prof), I fully empathize with students on the exorbitant prices of today's college textbooks in ALL subjects.

But I have a unique and advantageous perspective on the root causes of current textbook pricing.

As an undergrad in the mid-80's, I worked for both my college bookstore (independently owned by the Student Union as are many in the western US) and one of a handful of "used book" companies that existed nationally at that time.

At that time, the average life expectancy of a college text was ~ 5 years. Certainly, the cost and effort to make changes to a current edition was far greater than it is today, given the ease of electronic typesetting and page layout, but more importantly, the used book market at that time was low with few players and the publishers were still selling new books and making profits.

Today, the market is saturated with used books within 3 years, and since it is far easier to move material/chapters electronically, many "new" editions involve little more than cover art changes with minimum content editing (including error carry-over from one edition to the next) and have a shelf life of 3 years.

Markup on textbooks has always been very low compared to the tradebook markets and current pricing is the result of pricing established by the publishers and not the retail outlets (whether that is the college bookstore or an off-campus competitor). As is the case with most other markets, big online retailers such as Amazon get price breaks from their vendors and can exist on very low profit margins.

If SprawlMart decided to get into the college text market, students could walk in and pay the same low prices found at the online retailers (unless of course, their local community hadn't already purged themselves of the evil that is Sprawlmart... but that's another topic).

In the Life Sciences, few profs write their own texts and I know many profs in Chemistry, Entomology, and Computer Sciences, none of whom have written their own textbooks. The commitment required to write a college-level textbook of any merit is enormous. Even profs wholely dissatisfied with the textbook options available for some courses usually settle for the least worst book rather than undertake authoring a textbook.

So IMO, ultimately the cause of the current state of college text prices falls on the used book market (who legitimately found a profitable niche) and the publishers.

Re:textbooks

[bcrowell]

At $130 retail price, the professor is probably taking half or $50.
A typical royalty is about 10 to 12 percent of "net" (i.e., wholesale), which works out to be about 7.5-9% of retail, not 38%, as you seem to be assuming.

and thats more than 4 colors.
"Four colors" refers to the number of colors of ink, not the number of colors that can be produced by mixing them, which is theoretically infinite.

$20 to $30 to print a book? You gotta to be kidding. 0.10 a cents page?
The textbooks that are $130 typically have a page count of about 1000-1100 pages, rather than the 200-300 pages you seem to be assuming. The ppb (paper, printing, and binding) cost for black and white upper division physics textbooks is typically about 3 dollars. Four-color printing costs four times more than one color, and the $130 color undergrad textbooks are typically about twice the page count of a graduate text, so 3x4x2 gives about $24. The price is really a setup cost; once you've got the press running, the cost to make one more copy is very small. This is all going to depend a lot on the length of the press run.

one cliche, one other

[yagu]

I know this is cliche, but Grapes of Wrath is a classic, and one of my alltime favorites. I've read it four or five times, and it gets better each read. Yeah, it's always in the "list", but it deserves to be.

Another favorite of mine is more related to what /.-ers are about. Read Player Piano by Vonnegut. It's not his most well know work, but it is, I think, maybe one of his best, certainly one of his most perceptive. Just my $.02.

Re:Out of print

[pbranes]

Out of print books online is a great idea, but what I can't understand is why google doesn't have a page that just lists the books they have in full-text. They compare it to a bookstore, but in a bookstore you can see books you have never heard of. You can't do that with google's library because you can only search for books that you know.

Highlighting is annoyuing

[PhilHibbs]

So once you've got "Origin of Species" up on the screen, how do you prevent it from highlighting every occurrence of the words "Origin", "of" and "species" in yellow? It's very annoying.

Holy copyright imbroglio!

[bigtallmofo]

From the Harvard FAQ at: http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/041213faq.html ...

Will this include books still in copyright? Google will be scanning books that are in as well as out of copyright from the Harvard collections. Harvard-owned books in the public domain will be available in the search results. Google may choose to display descriptive catalog information for books that are still under copyright. We believe that Google's treatment of in-copyright works is consistent with copyright law.

If I'm reading this correctly, that Google is placing the text of copyrighted works into a freely searchable and viewable database, it's an amazingly brazen step. It's also incredibly useful, but I can't imagine book publishers lying down for this. Add to this Disney's propensity for lobbying for extending copyrights everytime Mickey Mouse comes up for entering the public domain and I think we're headed for an interesting copyright showdown.

Holy Bible?

[OAB_X]

Surprisingly enough, they have not scanned the Holy Bible yet. You think with it being the #1 best selling book of al time they would have, but I guess not.

Holy Bible missing

Re:Holy Bible?

[OAB_X]

Surely there is a Bible somewhere in Harvards library. There is no Koran listed also. Ferhaps thef are staying away from scanning religious books so far?

what full text???

[wes33]

when I clicked the link for "origin of species" the google-book results are links to books you can **buy** with a small number of sample pages to look at.

After the google-books results, you get the ordinary google results, some of which *do* link to online texts.

To find Darwin's book on line to read, rather than buy, just use regular google. Book search seems to be just a commercial venture.

Or am I missing something?

Am I Missing Something

[BaltoAaron]

I'm not able to see more than a few pages of each of the books linked in the article. Am I missing something?

No Right Click

[Luke Psywalker]

{if (event.button == 2) return false;}

The source is ugly too. Would be nice if it was xml.

Annoying but cool.

[tgd]

Those are clearly scanned images.

I think its pretty nifty how they are able to highlight search terms within text pages they've clearly OCRed or something.

Re:Now the question is...

[xSauronx]

I won't....at least the entire text. I will, however, take advantage of this should i wish to find certain quotes or passages.

When it comes to reading a full book i'm not comfortable sitting in front of the pc and scrolling through the pages; I read to get away from the computer. I like to take a book on a car ride, or outside or to lay on my couch and relax while i read.

In fact...i recently bought "The Origin of Species" because I didn't want to sit in front of a screen and read it; even though i could easily go to project gutenberg and do so. I can take a book to the kitchen with me and read it as im cooking, or browse over a text as i watch the kids or just before i go to sleep.

Another thing i like about solid texts is that i can write in them...highlight things of interest that i would like to look up further, or things that stand out to me as interesting in some way. If I want to show part of a book to someone i can just...grab the book, without having to bother to print it, or get them to check their email, or i can lend a book to people who arent comfortable reading the whole thing on a pc screen over a period of several hours.

In summary: i prefer books, not screens, when it comes to lengthy reading. I'll take a book any day over most any e-reader someone may come up with (unless its damn durable, damn cheap, and damn easy to get any book ill ever want onto it for a fair price).

Oliver Twist is copyrighted?

[WareW01f]

Last I checked Oliver Twist was written by Charles Dickens whose been dead for over 125 years. I was sure this fell under public domain, but I could be wrong.

Makes you wonder. At some point here there's going to start to be battles over who owns the rights to sections of the bible! Where will it end? (might clean up the 10 commandments issues as a simple copyright infringment. :)

I'll never read online

[WankersRevenge]

Reading books in an experience for me. For me, reading is more than just scanning my eyes over text. I love the feel of a book. Especially the smell of an old one. I love to underline favorite passages and write down any thoughts that come to mind about them. I love bending the pages back so I can read while walking. And when I'm finished, I usually give my book to interested friends. My only requirement is that they write in them as well. You can't get that online.

Plain Text Please

[DoorFrame]

I don't really see the utility of this besides the ability to search within a book. First of all, you don't get a plain text version, so I can't download it and read it offline. Secondly, most of these books are already covered by Project Guttenburg which does provide plain text versions that you can download to a PDA and read at your leisure.

Now, I readily admit I'm one of the few people who enjoys reading books off a PDA, but even I hate reading books on a regular computer screen. I don't think there's many people who will sit down and read long treatises this way. I could be wrong, but it seems unlikely.

Also, the system doesn't seem to let you jump quickly and easily within a book. There's no "Go to page X" ability, you can only move slowly forward and backward from a handful of starting positions.

This just doesn't seem very helpful (again, except if you're looking for a quote within a book and you want to search for it... this while be great for that).

Get around context menus

[DoorFrame]

You can get around the disabled context menus, but it involves a little bit of sifting through the html. For example this is a page from 20,000 Leagues under the sea. Google set the background as the image you want to see, and placed a clear gif file above that, so when you click on view image, you just see the clear gif. Anyway, they didn't do anything too sneaky to hide the original image, it's just annoying.

What happened to "don't be evil"?

Hacking Google Print

[un1xl0ser]

There is an interesting k5 article caled Hacking Google Print.
Check it out.

Re:Controversial?

[northcat]

Nice list of all the countries mentioned on American TV channels there. And nice way of giving a separate entry for USA. You forgot India and China, the two biggest fucking countries in the world. I live in India and evolution is not controversial here. We learn evolution in our text books and we accept it. And the same case in China. And most other countries. We (non-US people) have different places for religious documents and scientific facts. We use religious documents for religious ceromonies/festivals etc., and we use science for everything else. (You're only giving reasons for why it's *possible* for evolution to be controversial outside USA. You're not giving any proof for that.) Only in USA do people take a religious document literally and try to put it over science and justify it using science. That's what we mean when we say evolution is not controversial outside USA - we don't reject evolution saying that it contradicts our religious documents. And we don't have such a huge group of people so vigorously working for the acceptance of some non-scientific crackpot theory over evolution. So when you call evolution controversial, either admit that it's only controversial in USA or go out of your mom's basement and look around - the world is not what it seems like on TV and over the Internet. Not all countries are like USA.