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.
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?"
Here is a hint that will help and not hurt the publishers. Put online out of print books. I would like to make the same argument for out of print music and movies and scientific journals as well which ironically, could hold huge profits for studios and publishing houses. After all, this is the ideal for long tail businesses, right? if these businesses could release for nominal fees all of the movies, music and books that have already paid for themselves, Google (or iTunes or iMovie or iPub or whatever) could serve as the front end which would allow for the finding of said information and then the publishing houses could make money on products that long ago had paid for themselves and created profits. This is almost like free (as in beer) money for them and low cost media for us.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
With all of these great works online, will the masses bother to read them?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Will Google be GoogleLibraryCasting their Library?
Unless you're [Insert Term Here]casting you're nobody!
I love google I really do and as an avid reader I'm happy to see this take place. I have a personal book collection of over 500 books (Pretty small when you think about it) that I got before I discovered ebooks. Seeing google take a step to advance liturature and make it easily scearchable is truly an advancement worth noting.
It would be great if textbooks were on there. $120 is too much for a calculus book.
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.
This could save a student hours of finding books in the library, not to mention tons of cash (which they are incredibly short of).
I am guessing though that they aren't allowed to publish a lot of recent books due to copyright?
"If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware this book is stolen property."
Google, you theives!
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.
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/
I clicked on Pride and Prejudice -- the page is an image (dynamically generated with search phrases highlighted). My gripes: (1) context menus are disabled (so, may be difficult to save the image from the page), and (2) there is a big "copyrighted material" sign on the side. In my opinion, they should have scanned the public domain version of the novel -- like what Gutenberg does...
S
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.
I'm a big tall mofo.
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
(and yes, I know, you can edit the URL manually)
Since google blocks you from viewing the entire book this will only help to increase book sales. Most times I read an entire book not just half a dozen pages. It may be that sales of reference books decreases since in those cases usually I only need to read a couple of pages to get the information I need. Even then, the rest of the internet is likely to have the answer somewhere or I'm likely to get the book from a library. All in all this can only be good for book sales.
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?
I'm not able to see more than a few pages of each of the books linked in the article. Am I missing something?
"We all know that Crap is King" - Don Henley
Being able to read more than the table of contents. Maybe I'm too dumb, but how do you get to any of the actual text? Clicking the little arrows eventually stops on all those examples, and it's always before any of the real text of the work appears.
{if (event.button == 2) return false;}
The source is ugly too. Would be nice if it was xml.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I just browsed around and these books are not actually "available" to read in full. The only pages you can get at are those with matches to your search. You can't just choose to go to page 1, and click "next page" until you get to the end of the book. If you want to actually read these books in full, try something like http://www.online-literature.com/
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
The parent is right on... Even if textbooks cost ~25 cents each time they were viewed, it would still save college students hundreds of dollars. That's a genius idea. It would boost google's popularity, and help save people money.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
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.
The first thing that would come to mind would be a storm of lawsuits from publishers, worried about losing their core business. MP3 sharing and Music Companies come to mind.
But then, this article is more re-assuring.
It seems the publishing industry is behaving more sanely than the music industry. Technology is progressing, and change is inevitable. Its better that we accept it. But then again, sharing music could be more detrimental to CD sales, than viewing text on a computer screen would be to book sales.
Life is just a conviction.
Can't seem to pick a page to start at... they must be limiting this to search-only, not reading or printing whole books. Seems to be a parameter in the URL, but you can't just change it. And after a search, you seem to get a few pages of contect in either direction.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
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...
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.
At the time Darwin published the papers they were controversial. The curch was in power in many states in Europe and that meant that Darwin was commiting heresay by suggesting such things.
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.
Depending on how your Firefox Adblock extension is set up, it may be blocking the images. Simply disable it for viewing Google Print.
I know this is just nitpicking, but why "controversial"? Darwin's "Origin of Species" _was_ controversial in 1860's.
Oh yeah, I forgot, evolution is still news to some individuals of our species.
ghh...
Seems like a nice system, but why on earth are they serving the books as images rater then text if they've OCR'd them all?
Of course I'm pretty sure the answer is to try and stop people copying the books (I see they've pulled out all the stops on the actual page to prevent people getting at the image files too).
Surely it would be much more useful to have the books in text format though.
Check out Baen Boooks, at , and take the link to the free library. Putting books on line has helped Baen's sales, not hurt them. Every time thety put a new book on line in the free librasry, sales of that author's books increas - even sales of the book that is available for free.
Baen put a CD into a hardcover book with all the rest of the books in that series on it. Sales increased.
It'll be interestin to see how publishers deal with this if demand for these books declines.
That's a very big if indeed - I wouldn't want to read a 300-page book from screen if it's still available in print.
The decrease in sales to people who would (will) do so, could very well be compensated by the increase in sales from people who wouldn't have known about a certain book otherwise.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
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.
Hmm, just looked up 20,000 leagues and it only gives you the front and back cover, as well as the table of contents and the "if you found this book without a cover" notice... Can't seem to get any further into the book. Are you supposed to be able to read the books online or is it just for phrase referencing?
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Firefox allows for the right-click menu, however the dynamically generated text image is a blank image when you open it by itself.
Yeah. You're missing the fact that the entire book is there for you to read, aparently.
The books links are to the book, not to books you can buy. You're clicking the wrong link or reading the page you get to wrong.
It seems to me that this might be redundant effort on top of the great work done by Project Guttenberg. While I am all for independent approaches to issues such as this, me thinks that the resources of Google paired up with the experience and resources of PG would be a good thing. It would be very nice to see all these books as actual text files, instead of scanned images, but I'm not complaining!
I submitted the article (from a different computer), and then after having a read of the book, I found I was mistaken.
You don't actually get the full book. After a little digging, it turned out that Google Library isn't even integrated into the results yet. (It's just partials from publishers)
I'm sorry about this. I'd kind of hoped the editors would see the mistake.
Unfortunately, the search which yields Darwin's (decidedly not controversial, at least among biologists) Origin of Species claims that it is still covered under copyright. While that may be true of the edition that they used as source material, it is decidedly not true of the original work itself, which is available from a wide number of places like Project Gutengerg.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
Seems like Google went the way of yoyo and became more and more like a regular ad wrapped content site.
This book seach is not what you might think it is. You cannot read any page you want in a book. Only 2-3 sample pages... (you get the idea) pfff. Amazon.com did this a long time ago. Anyway do you guys know of a simpler, search engine. Kinda like what Google used to be? I'd switch imediately. I am sick of these search result manipulations and less relevant info.
Peace
out of curiosity, does the creative commons license infect other work like the GPL does? hypothetically speaking, if it did, would including work under that license infect everything else and make it all creative commons?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I had no idea what the Book Results and leaning-book icon were -- I thought they were ads from Google trying to sell me books.
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
There is no need for the outragous fees charged undergraduate students for the first half of engineering and science programs. Physics at the undergraduate level does not change much. I learned the same calculus my father did 30 years previous to I.
Ditto statics and mechanics. Ditto introductory chemistry. Ditto analytical geometery. Ditto, ditto, ditto.
One can make all sorts of conspiracy theories as to why students need these texts foisted upon them.
Wikibooks has a lot of promise for a top notch open-source reference textbook. Consider writing or revising some material in there.
I won't even get into how badly it sucked lugging around 50lbs of textbooks my first year of engineering.
..don't panic
I was excited till I took a look at it. I mean hopefully it will develop over time, but it looks a lot like Amazon's preview pages so far. I was hoping it would be more like Gutenberg with a focus on sending you the entire text in one file so you can print it. Clearly this would be far more desireable than offering the content page-by-page.
My first search, "Justine" by de Sade, brought up a page that looked like a hung-over secretary had scanned it in with no concern for margins. The last word of every sentence disappears off the side. I'm sticking to Gutenberg.
Idiot.
all the books, none of the "shhhh". plus, you can surf for pr0n, unlike in a regular library.
The text is not copyrighted... but when someone takes a public domain text and publishes it, the resulting book IS copyrighted. If you scan that version, you are showing copyrighted material even if the contents aren't. You either have to reset the text yourself, or you have to find a book that was published long enough ago that the book itself is out of copyright.
Ages ago a friend of mine had a VERY old book of mechanical line drawings (nearly 100 years old). We planned for a while to scan all of them and put out a clipart CD. The content itself had been republished back in the 80's, and we were told very specifically that if we did it we *had* to do the scans from the old book, not a newer printing of it.
We decided that unbinding the book wasn't worth it...
If you buy one for $125 you sponsor
(a) The publisher and
(b) The author
So they wouldn't save money. Right now, you can get intro books for 14.99, from noname professors. Most colleges require the $125 ones.
P.S.: There is a for example the Calculus books at UPenn which has math books for free.
I am waiting for Google music, tv shows, and movies. So that when I search for a song it will offer me the option of buying it online.
TV shows of the future should be downloadable.
And still Copyrited Material? Souldnt it be writen
on the side of each page "Public domain material"?
How comme somme one claim the right to copy the
book of a autor that die 123 years ago?
Please enlighten me.
Bob
btw, why the text is not selectable? do google
render each page whit word highlite whit different
color each time?
OK. Go to this link and enlighten the rest of us as to how you can get more than pages 204-208.
I see four pages and links in the bottom left to buy. The only way I can see to defeat it is to go to "more results" which will let you get 4-page snippets starting at any page. But that cuts down on readability pretty substantially. It may be enough to screw google from a fair use standpoint, but I'm not their legal team (or anyone's, for that matter).
It's nice to see they are focusing on indexing the "great" books of the world.
Read any good sonnets lately?
After all, there's a war on terror going on, and Computers Don't Argue
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
heresy, not heresay.
subtle but different.
-1 pedant.
could you please remind yourself, that the internet is international? most non-US readers will not understand this combination of words. thanks.
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).
--
RumorsDaily
Charles Darwin's controversial treatise.
How is it controversial? Not all of us live in USA, you know.
I believe Slashdot has an FAQ on that: here
Only the folks whom have a belief system incompatible with scientific thought and knowledge deem Origin of the Species to be "controversial". These are the same folks who tend to argue against the "old earth", as their belief system does not allow for an earth older than about 6000 years, and demand amusing stickers on childrens text books.
We will get to the stickers in a second.
These folks attempt to deny observation, specifically of fossils, red shifts, cosmological background radiation, and so forth. They deny that evolution or something similar took place. They deny that dinosaurs roamed the earth 65+ million years ago.
Of course, we now know lots of things we didn't know back when the original OotS was published, and the amazing aspect of this is that the process of science marches on while some folks are stuck in their intellectual cul-de-sacs. What is sad to me as a scientist is when the public hands these folks power, and they decide to start pushing their particular (usually unsupported by evidence, and absolutely un-falsefiable) viewpoint.
The stickers are a perfect example of this. They like to slap stickers on text books declaring that OotS is "just a theory and not fact". Moreover they like to claim that there are multiple viable theories of origin. Further they posit that intelligent designer or one of the other variants of creationism, carefully crafted to avoid direct mention of god so as to be able to get into a public school and not be blocked as the expression of religion that it really is, as a viable theory.
Some of this is right, some is not. Obviously these folks do not grasp science, the scientific method, and many other things. A theory is *exactly* what OotS is. No, you can *never* prove a physical/chemical/biological theory, though you can disprove one with contradictory evidence. And finally, a scientific theory, a theory that adheres to the fundamental principles of scientific inquiry, is at its core, falsafiable.
The last point is simply not possible to those pushing creationism and its intelligent designer variants. How could something "created by god" be falsified by man? Well, if it is a science, then it can be. Simple as that. If you disagree, then you have a belief system incompatible with scientific inquiry, and you should stop hawking your opinions as if they were scientific. They are religious, you have a right to express your religion, but where the religion clashes with scientific paradigm and thought, you need to be prepared to back down, and let science discuss the scientific thoughts. When you try to force your world view and belief system on all students, you violate their rights, and my rights as a parent, to teach the religion of my choosing to my child. When you seek to denigrate an area that you obviously know nothing about, using lawyer-like tactics to make falacious arguments about content that you are not qualified to discuss, all you do is waste taxpayer money, time, effort, as we scientists will staunchly oppose gutting scientific content to appease a bunch of people who are better off doing something else.
So, to summarize, the only folks for whom this is controversial are ill-qualified to make such a determination, and are guided not by seeking of truth, but by religious conviction, which attempts to mask truth, in favor of a preferred belief. Remember, this happened for millenia in Europe. Gallileo had some run-ins with the church over observations. You never want to let them have enough power to stop or limit scientific inquiry or education: you see what they have done with it in the past, and what they are trying to do now. Remember that. They will always try, and we have to be always vigilant to prevent them from decimating subjects they know nothing about, because the subject disagrees with their beliefs (and they want to impose their beliefs on all of us).
The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort.
> For instance, book origin of species will turn up the full text
> of Charles Darwin's controversial treatise.
Excellent framing, AC. We are now acknowledging that there is a "controversy" regarding "Origin of Species" - much in the same way that there is a "large number of complaints" about indecency on TV directed at the FCC (which turned out to be 8 people with a stencil machine).
Un-believable.
For instance, book origin of species will turn up the full text of Charles Darwin's controversial treatise.
I think it's sad that "The origin of species" is referred to as controversial. What's next, Newton's "Principia Mathematica" considered controversial?
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
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"?
--
RumorsDaily
You're missing the facts that a) it's a search tool, not a place to get free ebooks, and b) the books the article is linking to are copyrighted works (the work in question, say "Romeo and Juliet", itself might be in the public domain, but the one they digitized was a new edition)
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
Proverbs 21:19
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$) hold about 150 ebooks.
Ebookwise is sturdy and intended for carrying around; it's a great form factor, with a rubbery outside. And yes, I've read it in the bathtub. http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogr
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
In most parts of the world, Origin of Species hasn't been controversial for well over a century.
GPL is no more "infectous" than any other license. MS's license which forces your work to be owned by MS is far more odousious.
Yup. Go to your local bookstore and look up any of those. You'll find multiple editions from multiple publishers, some who specialize in just selling the most book for the least price, some that differentiate themselves with extra introductions or annotations or whatever (and they do have copyright on those extras). This is all good, and it's been going on for ever.
--Bruce Fields
Well, I have to say that at least so far, I'm unimpressed.
I didn't have long to mess with it, but the few searches I did do came up with tables of contents and/or copyright pages, and either no text at all or a few page excerpt. In each case the pages had "Copyrighted material" on the margins...even the copy of Voltaire's Candide. Somehow it seems to me that a book published in 1759 should be public domain by now...
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
The full texts are not available, and these are not books scanned from the libraries mentioned in the post. The links are to sample selections of the books scanned in by publishers by googles "print" project. You can then buy the books at the links on the right hand side. This is really old.
There is an interesting k5 article caled Hacking Google Print.
Check it out.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
not mine, but this http://www.gregduffy.com/2005/03/04/1109964561920. html page has a great technique (some coding required) for getting around the page limit.
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.
Apparently, stating the fact that evolution is only controversial to those people who find it inconsistent with their strongly-held religious beliefs is trolling.
I think this moderation proves my point.
Nice to see that the moderator concerned couldn't rise to the challenge that I set down by providing any credible evidence to counter evolution and just went straight for the "-1 Troll" option instead.
Everything in my post is fact. If you have problems with the facts as I've stated them, then say what those are. Else, don't try to stifle a valid point just because you disagree with it.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I believe Google's plan is to focus its efforts on books people actually might be interested in reading first. But I'm sure they'll get to Creative Commons licensed books eventually!
http://print.google.com/
If you go into a library these days on a college campus you notice something perhaps a little disturbing - almost no students are actually looking at books - they are all on the computers looking up stuff online. Now that even books are being posted - in their entirety - online, why should students.. or for that matter, anyone, actually make the trip to the library anymore to look up information? There will be archives and book-based libraries well into the future, but will their purpose simply become a hard-copy back-up for all the information online? And will libraries.. eventually.. simply become massive electronic databases themselves.. actual hard-copy codex books put away in some climate-controlled basement somewhere never to be seen? I think we are looking at the future right now, and there is a big transition already underway.
thanks - brad, http://www.googleadvisor.org
It's amazing that posts in this thread that disagree with Origin of Species being controversial are moderated as Trolls. I had mod points until yesterday but they are gone now.
Perhaps Google is only scanning in books that have their copyrights already expired? That way they will not violate any copyright laws.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
...and we immediately see the problem with scanning the books into their database. Take Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance. The book has entered the public domain, and you can access the Project Gutenberg book here.
Google's copy, however, is scanned from the PenguinClassics version, which is copyrighted (the formatting, and images). So, on Google Books, you are unable to read the book, even though it has enetered the public domain.
Using "controversial" to describe Origin of Species is like using "long" to describe Don Quixote - you are simply not capturing what is important about it.
As parent implies, if this we were living in the late 1800s then, sure, "controversial" would be a fair adjective. But today, after having had 150 years to think about it, adjectives such as "influential", "seminal" or even just "brilliant" are far more apt.
As Daniel Dennett has written: "Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else."
Darwin's theory of evolution, and the evolutionnary synthesis of the beginning of the 20th century, however widely accepted by the scientific community and massivelly corroborated by independent observations, remain a theory, not a fact!
Even your analogy with gravity doesn't work! Altought it is a fact that If I have something in my hand and let it go it falls to the ground, the theory of gravity explains why and how this happens, not that it happens!
Scientific facts are uninteresting by themselves, they are just things that we can observe given the proper tools. Theories, however, are complex sets of hypothesis that try to explain natural phenomenon and that have survived the test of time! Theories are way more interesting than facts! If a theory is a building, then the bricks are hypotheses.. the facts are simply the raw clay!
I looked at the links listed in the article but it seems like all of the instances of downloadable texts therein come from other websites and have nothing to do with Google or its project. Many literary works already have been converted into electronic form, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and others by Project Gutenberg etc. and have been avialable online for sometime.
No, you are off the topic of the article.
Google's Library Up and Running
as opposed to
Slashdot polls open debate about evolution
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
While it is all well and good to have the full texts available for searches, as a practical matter it is not too useful if you can't even select and copy a small portion.
For instance--you vaguely remember a quotation and search for it under Google. Up pops a link to Google Print. You can see the original context, but cannot copy a section, in context for a paper, article, etc.
So what good did it do? You probably could have gotten a simple citation elsewhere.
Also, anything available under Project Gutenberg should also have a link to PG text.
I really think that if they stick to the classic works that have no copyright issues this will be a great thing for all. This makes the research and reading of historical works more easily accessible. This could also really open up the world to a true digital library available to anyone everywhere and that cannot be anything but good.
With regards to the printers loosing money; I do not think it will be replacing the traditional books though any time soon. Most people that I know still enjoy the tactile sensation of reading an actual hard copy book as oposed to e-book style literature. Who knows though, future generations who live out most of their day-to-day lives interacting with web enabled content may choose differently. We are today setting the ground works for our children and grandchildren to enjoy leasure of a true digital age of always available content.
"Help me Obi-/.-Kenobi,your my only hope!" -$
Many Japanese are reading entire novels on their cell phones. Maybe because they use public transportation more?
I did pay for legal advice that said it absolutely was true.
/.
I'd trust the lawyer over a one-liner on
For what its worth, thats why Bill Gates can own the electronic rights to most of the great works of art in the world -- because republished images of a work themselves have a copyright... so the only way you can legally get an image of the Mona Lisa in digital form is to take it yourself... you can't scan someone else's image and claim its legal because the painting is hundreds of years old.
The story summary (submitted by someone who chose to remain anonymous) labels the book "controversial". Aren't I allowed to take issue with that?
And if it's in the story summary then how the hell is it off-topic?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Google doesn't offer full versions of even the oldest books- there's no full version of Origin of Species, and I haven't found the Shakespeares' to be full, either.
I don't doubt that it may be too expensive to print out books on an old laser, but that doesn't mean it's too expensive to print out on-line books period.
Refillable inkjets have come a long way baby. If you haven't seen it yet, most Epson inkjets how can be fitted with pint sized bottles of ink and printing 500 pieces of A4 paper front and back doesn't cost more than a buck in my experience.
If you add both paper and ink you should still be able to easily keep the cost under five bucks for five hundred pages. That's a thousand pages of A4 if you print both sides. If you print it landscape with two pages to the side, which makes a volume about the size of a trade paperback, now you're getting two thousand pages for five bucks. I don't think even used paperbacks can match that price these days. Even at thrift stores I see books going for a buck.
With your average novel being two hundred pages in paperback format, that's the equivalent of fifty cents a book. Alright, perhaps not a huge savings but consider that you're getting much, much better paper and in many cases better text printing.
So far, it's not all that impressive. But add the fact that you can print images for the same price as text and the DIY solution starts to really pull ahead.
Now, what finally makes it a no comparison situation is if you had a vast library to choose from on-line. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be what Google is offering, but as has been stated elsewhere, Guttenberg and affiliated projects are still going strong. Given a few decades they will certainly be enormous volumes of text available on-line even if Google isn't going to be the one to make it happen in in the next few months.
And for those renegades who believe that copyright law has been totally bastardized and should not be obeyed as a matter of principle, there are already wonderful resources for obtaining major quantities of text.
The one thing that is lacking is a cheap mass market printer with glossy card stock binding abilities. I'm sure it's just a matter of time. Till then, hand binding is really quite simple if you save up a few hundred volumes and do them all at once. Heavily illustrated works are definitely worth it.
It's interesting that "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" is described as controversial by the submitter but "Oliver Twist" isn't.
I think that tells us something, although I'm not sure exactly what it is, yet.
No but, yeah but, no but...
The statement that OOTS is controversial is deeply offensive to me, given my strongly held beliefs.
... Orbits Sun. ... More Than 6000 Years Old.
As a result I've decided to go on a brief spree of gratuitous offensiveness myself. Children and old ladies should look away now:
* Earth Not Flat.
*
*
* Santa Claus - Made Up.
I can't seem to access the full text for books. Can someone please link me to the full text of origin of species on google?
Uch... Google Print results have been appearing in Google for over a year. Why does Slashdot believe anything anyone sends them?
Ah, my oversight.
send(s, *b, sizeof(b)*sizeof(unsigned char), SIO_APOLOGY);
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Did a search for book cthulhu and one of the books listed was this one. Funniest networking book I have ever seen.
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
I checked it out, and would consider helping - just wondering, but the one I checked out (General Chemistry) didn't look too good as a learning text, though it was structured well as a reference.
Is that the design? Because I think it's also important that something be devised that work as a learning text. And I'd be willing to help where possible.
What's so controversial about "Origin of Species" ? It's a coherent and convincing explanation for a natural phenomenon, that does not depend on supernatural intervention.
How else would you explain the phenomenon of speciation, without invoking the supernatural?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Darwin mostly avoided talking about human evolution in the Origin of Species. He really only dealt with the topic in the (aptly named) Descent of Man. Now, that isn't to say that the public didn't pitch a fit after The Origin. So, I wouldn't say that the book itself was controversial but (if you catch my drift) that the controversy was controversial. The subject matter was pretty tame (even by the day's standards).
Easy to find what i'm looking for, more organized and less of a hassle.
Sure they don't have all texts on there, but the Yahoo search seems to do a better job grabbing the free texts out there to begin with.
I'm going to change my sig (well, guess I would need to make an original first) to "P.S. I know this post will get modded flamebait". It seems to be a surefire way to get modded either +5 interesting or +5 insightful
I'd just like to point out that they http://www.promo.net/pg/ have been making available full texts of out-of-copyright books for a much longer time than the current web darling. And I suspect they will continue to do so well beyond the time when nerdly zeal for Google has waned.
The evidence is OVERWHELMING - according the cover story of National Geogrphic from Nov 2004:
http://www.ironcircus.com/blog/000267.html
So many programs now uses genetic programming, the new field of synthetic biology, and so much more are based on the initial idea of evolution.
Please don't pander to the religious zealots because most of them don't read slashdot anyways. And if they are and they uses email, chances are the spam filter it employs uses some type of genetic algorithm.
Statement like these can slowly drift weak minds toward stupidity... what next ?
The earth is flatMasturbation will sent you to hell
beware...
"Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." - Nietzsche
I am all for digitizing our libraries. But some of the texts are already in ebook form. Why don't they just return results from Project Gutenberg?
I know if I am looking for books on Sherlock Holmes, it won't be through Google Print. I am going straight to Gutenberg.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
Geezuus you americans are stupid. I guess that's what your owners want. If you would just stay home it wouldn't matter so much.
If everyone who posted to slashdot proofed a few pages every now and again at Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreading project, things would be a lot better. Go on, you'll be making a much more important contribution to the world!
http://www.pgdp.net
P.S., I'm not a hypocrite. I've done 4 pages today.
Unfortunately, Gutenberg is text-only. While that is okay for some books, for others pictures and typesetting are part of what makes the book work.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I followed the link "20000 leagues" in the article. I found this this. There is no full text.
Indeed, Amazon beat google to the searching through copyrighted material thing. I would think that Amazon would actually be a bigger target on this issue too, than google, as most of Amazon's catalogue is likely made up of copyrighted works.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Except that neither "The Origin of Species" nor "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" are under copyright at the moment. I'm not sure what Dover is claiming copyright on when they say the publication is (c) Dover 1996 (or whenever). It could be the presentation (ie typesetting, layout, etc); or it could be any forward added for their particular edition. But it should be obvious that the TEXTS of these books are public domain, and Google is being somewhat inaccurate by claiming copyright as the reason they're not letting you read the whole thing.
Google's usually pretty good about making their pages compatible with handheld devices, but this one just plain sucks on my ipaq. guess i'll stick with project gutenberg.
Beyond Good and Evil
If you are a student at a place like the University of Saskatchewan, you go to a students' union run centre like Browsers which consigns books.
The selling student gets most of the money from the buying student, and the USSU gets a small percentage for the upkeep of Browsers. This way, you're not wasting several hundred dollars on texts each year (if you're not keeping them, as is the case with most first- and second-year textbooks); you're just transfering a deposit along.
It should be noted that this only works on google.com; doing the same thing on google.co.uk (which you may like me innocently redirected to) will not work.
Being available on google CONSTITUTES a reprinting in digital form for all practical purposes. There will still be a market for some old books in paper, but the competition from the digital form may make paper reprinting uneconomical ( unless you use your trusty lazer printer to print your own copy ). We may even see companies willing to print custom bound copies of google-only books using specialized equipment for those books whose demand can not justify a full reprinting. That way you could still have a brand new real physical copy of an out of print book ANYTIME whereas now you must find a ( possibly rare ) used copy of out of print books.
That doesn't turn up the King James version of the Bible. Only books about King James.
book King James Bible only turns up a literary analysis. Not the actual Bible. It's simply not in their system or under some magic terms that we havn't figured out yet.
I don't know how a bogus link got modded up +5 Informative. Oh, right, this is Slashdot. Mod first then ask questions.
Google has also added National Vanguard, a neo-Nazi white supremacist web site to their "legitimate" news sources.
So, I'm pretty much done caring what what Google's employees are doing. As long as their search engine remains sane, they can scan whatever books and link to whatever news sources they want.
I have better places to get my news and books.
Work Safe Porn
At the time it was written, Origin was controversial. Just because they said "Charles Darwin's controversial treatise" doesn't necessarily mean they're referring to now, they could be referring to the fact that it was controversial when it was published.
That said, it's always better to reproduce from an early printing, and not a new printing, to avoid any question of copyright.
Very intersting idea, the concept is a great idea, and the way that its implamented into their searchs is perfect.
I know that its beta, but it really seems like they took an application that was existing from many years ago and didnt update the HTML, its not even 3.2 compliant, let alone 4.0.
The pages load fast, and work correctly in IE and firefox, but just because they work correctly in both browsers dosen't mean they shouldnt update to a standard.
TruePunk | Games
For those of you with enquiring minds - google seem to have done a pretty thorough job of preventing you from extracting the pages from books via javascript right click interceptor. Combining several cunning techniques such as dynamic stylesheet and also covering the book text with a large (dimensions) transparant gif. ...Firefox "Page Info" is the "Tools" menu contains a "Media" tab. it is here you will find the image you are looking for complete with a "Save As" button. Could be quite tedious to do this for each page but it proves that it can be done.
....
Im sure its still fairly trivial to script something to download entire books. But one thing they seem to have missed
I tried to download using wget but was unsuccesful - even though I specified a valid user agent. There must be some other check that google are doing.... It may be a case of writing a Firefox extension (hint, hint) - or can it be done with a simple python script?
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
As I've pointed out myself, thank you. But even Pride And Prejudice was very controversial when it was published, and somehow the story submitter chose not to label it as such in his story summary, did s/he?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
(Now if Google would just do my English thesis for me)
This is pretty off-topic, but I keep meaning to bring it up every time one of these stories appears, thinking maybe some book-types can help me out.
Project Gutenberg is really pretty incredible. However, I have no idea what half of the posted books are even about, let alone knowing whether they're worth reading or not. It feels really wasteful/ineffective to download a book just to skim it and guess whether I'll like it or not.
After I'm done with the top-100 list, where do I turn to see what books other readers think are worth reading? I would love to know about an Amazon-style rating system for Gutenberg books if it's out there somewhere, but so far I have searched to no avail.
Anyone? (Thanks!)
It could be the presentation (ie typesetting, layout, etc); or it could be any forward added for their particular edition.
Bingo.
These are scans of the books. Direct scans.
The text may be out of copyright, the scans of the book are most certainly not.
I understand (see above and http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,66950,00.h tml?tw=wn_tophead_3)
that the Japanese are reading books on their mobiles (cellphones, handies, select word according to region), however despite searching at the weekend, I couldn't find an application that would allow me to take the plaintext file from Project Gutenberg or elsewhere and turn it into something I could read in chunks on my Nokia6230 (a Series 40 phone I believe).
I have used Plucker on my Handspring for a while and found it excellent, but recently changed phones and discovered the 6230 makes my Handspring virtually redundant, but a book reader would really help. A 1Gb card in it already for mp3 files means a few hundred k for a novel really wouldn't be noticed.
I spend a fair amount of time travelling up and down the country on trains, and a little flying across Europe (ok, I can't use my mobile whilst in the air, but most of the time occupied by short haul air travel is on the ground), at the same time, I don't want to carry too many devices, or too many books.
Any suggestions?
no time, no sig
You might want to pay attention to what lawyers are really after. They want money. If they keep situations confused, they get more money. Therefore your odds of getting an honest, accurate answer from a lawyer, especially about IP issues is fairly low.
In the few classes where professors actually had their own textbooks, They were happy to provide paper-bound versions on-the-cheap (about $20-30 for over 500pages). For students unable to get even these cheap copies, the professors often had extras or photocopied pages (It's fair use if YOU wrote it right?).
I think part of the reason was that they were testing the books on the students, going through a few classes before full-scale publishing. My most expensive textbooks were all mass-published (but very low demand or used in more than one class) I don't believe the professors see very much of the purchase price.
The real criminal here is the school bookstores.
1 + $120 for a textbook you only use once
2 - $30 (coupon) buyback (you don't need it right?)
3 + $90 for the "used" book you only use once
4 - $20 (coupon) buyback
5 + $70per repeat 3,4 until publisher convinces prof to change books
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Too bad we can't mod the main stories "flamebait"
I couldn't get the Google Print results to show up following the links provided at first, nor by trying many other searches. Anyway, what solved it on Windows XP:
1) I deleted all my Google cookies. I have ones from the Spanish Google as well as the English, etc..
2) Switched to a US proxy on a more recognized ISP. Mine serves the US, but is less well known and deciding location by host names and what not has never worked well.
3) Ran Mozilla in Microsoft's AppLocale with the language set to English. I have my other regional settings on English/US, but do have non-unicode programs set to Japanese since it doesn't hurt my English programs and let's the Japanese ones work.
Anyway it finally started working after that. I haven't weeded out if it was one or all of them, just AppLocale didn't work, but whatever. Needless to say I won't be using this service which is PITA to access...they should make a seperate interface than the normal search one. That would allow freaking error messages that tell people what's going on as well.
Only way I can figure is, they have OCR'd the images and indexed each OCR'd word by its X/Y location on its image. So then, when you search for "frummage" they know where every instance of "frummage" starts (and its height and width) in the page image, so they can display the page image with the yellow hilite over the word.
At first this seems like a peculiar approach. Having OCR'd and indexed every word, why would they not simply store the words and discard those bulky bitmaps? I can think of two reasons.
One is probably copyright: they have a deal with that publisher to index that edition, and when words are indexed to specific page locations, Google is forever confined to displaying those page images and no others.
Second is that while it is fairly easy to extract words from page images, it is darn hard to reconstruct those words in pleasing HT- or XML that properly conveys the look and feel of the original book. I've worked on doing just this for Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders and it is very demanding.
I do this all the time.
After many years in road warrior mode, I'm totally fanatical about packing light. Gutenberg + Weasel = library of books on my Treo phone = one less thing to pack in the carry on.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For instance, book origin of species will turn up the full text of Charles Darwin's controversial treatise. If you still think this is controversial and are clinging to some other notion of the development of our current lifeforms on Earth, you may feel free to move back to 1900. As a History major approaching my degree, I've studied the Scopes trial four times in four separate classes here at Penn State, and always the conclusion is the same: How, knowing what we know now, could you possibly believe that evolution is a crackpot theory?
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
As the pope has officially sanctioned the theory of evolution (short form: God created Man by means of Evolution), I'd expect Darwins book to be rather uncontroversial in catholic countries.
In Hindu/Buddhist/Moslem countries I'd espect the particular book as rather controversial. Either because the people are modern/secular/western oriented, and accept it, or are conservative and just see it as an insignificant example of western decadance.
The only group I see objecting vehemontly to the particular book is fanatical protestant fundamentalists, and the only place I see those in any signficant numbers are rural USA.
Their is a similar Frech project, but its budget is 1/1000 the size of the Google Print budget. Jacques Chirac is going to try to get the rest of Europe to put together a project to put European literature online. While Google will have European literature, the fear is that it will be biased toward the "Angle-Saxon" point-of-view (e.g. the Scarlet Pimpernel over Victor Hugo on the French Revolution).
Are there no European companies who see an opportunity here? More generally, Yahoo and MSN are both trying to compete with Google. Are there any European competitors in search?
The works released under Creative Commons licenses and under open source licenses are generally already indexed by the normal google index, as they are almost always publish on the web.
The new feature is to index stuff not normally available on the net, such as printed books.
Also, the ready acceptance of Darwin's ideas in places such as Germany is hardly something to brag about. Darwinism was simply Bismark's blood-and-iron/might-makes-right/Realpolitik written into biology. And the fruit of that foul tree was you-know-who and the ideology whose name begins with Naz....
If you check, the subtitle to Darwin's The Origin of Species is By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Hitler simply claimed that the Aryan was Darwin's favoured race. You may disagree and substitute your own race, but in Darwinian terms the world is divided into favoured and unfavoured races, with progress only occuring when the former out multiplies or out kills the latter. That link to progress is why most eugenicists were in the socialist/feminist/liberal/progressive portion of the political spectrum.
Perhaps that's also why the French and Germans are so indifferent to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people that Saddam murdered. Arabs aren't members of their "favoured race," so their lives don't count, only their oil and their availability as a market for European arms. The master race must have its 35-hour week and long vacations. Note too the common European tendency to regard the Arab world as "unfit for democracy," which is apparently suitable only for the higher races. Darwinism again.
There was also a critical a difference between how Darwin's ideas were promoted. In Germany, Darwin's chief advocate was Ernst Haeckel, ranked by historians among the proto-Nazis. In the English-speaking world it was Thomas Huxley, who so abhored applying Darwinism to human society that he spoke and wrote against the idea. (See his Evolution and Ethics.)
And if you're from immigrant stock that came to the US from the 1850s on, you should be quite glad the US has been so anti-Darwinian. It was applied Darwinianism, aka eugenics, that inspired immigration restriction, sterilization and Margaret Sanger's nasty birth control movement (today's Planned Parenthood). The NY Times once trumpted eugenics as a "wonderful new science" and about the only book-length criticism of the 1920s was the "reactionary" G. K. Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils.The chief supporters of eugenic schemes such as forced sterilization (the Supreme Court's 1927 Buck v. Bell) were liberals. The chief opponents were religious conservatives including Catholics and Fundamentalists.
More recently, Darwinism and eugenics lay behind the drive to legalize abortion and the liberal zeal to bring its "benefits" to the black and Hispanic poor. I once had a liberal English professor whisper to me, "That's why we need abortion" as he pointed to a young black man nearby. And one of my neighbors confided to me that she voted Democratic because the Democrats were doing something (i.e. aborting) Seattle's rapidly growing Asian immigrant population.
You can check the historical background for all this at the Inkling University blog There you can read original source documents on the topic. You can even download in sections the hardback version of a book that sells for $50. That's an even better deal than Google's online books.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Editor: Eugenics and Other Evils, & The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective
Hopefully your third and unpublished reason holds up better than the first two.
If 120 dollars is the cost of a free and unregulated market (are you implying that there used to be regulation but those laws have been lifted when you use the word "deregulated"?), then why would the price of the same book in the United Kingdom sell for half the price? The only reasonable explaination is that they are different markets. Yet we've seen the rise of import-exporters who buy books in the UK (from the US) and ship them back to US buyers, and the subsequent rise against their policies. This is an artificially divided market, and the Supreme Court affirms this notion.
Surprisingly, Amazon charges more for the Digital Logic (the chess book) book I used than the college bookstore. It's still less at certain overseas resellers, which is strange.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
"It'll be interestin to see how publishers deal with this if demand for these books declines." Oh Pah-Leese! Project Gutenberg has been around for 34 years (started in 1971 by Michael Hart) and I don't seem to recall any publishers recoiling in horror. Sure, many of the 15,000 books they have available online (or available on CD) are post-copyright, but there is a lot of great reading there. That Google is scanning Gutenberg, or perhaps even buying their CD's and publishing isn't wrong or bad and won't make anyone go broke. But maybe, just maybe a few people will read some great old stories.
Specifically some out-of-copyright stuff acquired from people who will let them put it online.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This confirms my suspicion that politics is a circle, with the Far Right not that removed from an increasingly wide swath of the Left. Even anti-semitism, concealed as a strident anti-Zionism, is now common among liberals. And the gatekeepers at Google News seem to reflect that twisted POV.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
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.
Two true statements, but almost totally unconnected from each other. Almost all, as in I didn't find an exception, the books currently in Google Print were placed there by their publishers. This renders moot all of the "what will publisher's do now?!" comments that are currently filling this forum.
The "News for Nerds" is that the books scanned from the Library Project will begin filtering into Google results when the book provides significant information about the topic being searched. Eventually this resource along with Google Scholar, could become a better source of good information than the WWW.
I can see your point; I'm going to ignore it and give you a different viewpoint.
I've run a few classes, though sadly I'm not currently employed full-time doing it. When running those courses I got to choose a text, and a wide range of samples were 'generously' donated to me by the publishers. Each of those texts had their merits, but none of them fitted exactly how I wanted to run the course.
So I picked what I thought was best and supplimented it with my own notes when my course diverged too much from the text. I think this is the key thing undergrads tend to miss -- a textbook is designed to cover a topic and is very unlikely to have the same coverage that the course is supposed to. Perhaps bits are aimed too high, too low, not considered important, or just covered by other courses being run in the department.
Regardless, the textbook was better written than what I could achieve, but it not sticking to the course would have caused students some trouble. Had I kept running that course, I expect I would have gradually expanded my notes. And if I'd been particularly dedicated, I may well have combined them into a 'textbook' and sold it. This text would then fit the course perfectly, and it would change year-to-year as the course adapted to fit into my changing teaching style, changes in student demand, changes in the other courses, etc. Oh yeah, and maybe a little because the subject has moved on.
So, the point I'd like you to get is that most profs I know writing their own texts are doing it because they're experienced enough teachers that they don't want a textbook telling them how to structure their course. And they'd rather have a textbook fitting their course perfectly than have a slightly better textbook.
Finally, the only person I know who has got rich off writing textbooks was not doing it for their own class. The market is just too small.
Please, can't we at least HERE be free of this fundamentalist crap? There's absolutely nothing controversial about this book.
Oops, subject of parent should have been "Library or Publisher Supplied Texts?"
One implication is that if the scanned books found are only supplied by the publishers and not libraries, then the original Slashdot article is old news about the contents of Google Print.
Google has always been about searching indexed content. Google has never demonstrated an understanding of browsing. Browsing is a different paradigm from searching indexes.
Information seeking is common to both searching indexes and browsing. The Yahoo directory and the Open Directory are about browsing. Yes, Google indexes both of them and provides a dedicated search on the Open Directory. Yet Google does not seem to understand browsing any more than indexing content such as that provided by the Open Directory.
Browsing is a much harder problem on an internet scale than providing a search index. Browsing, like expert systems has good results for limited domains.
Furthermore, browsing content does not seem to fit with what Google may imagine as its own idea of how to maximise ad revenue. Google seems to have adopted the strategy of driving users to its core search index rather than segmenting users or confusing them with other means of accessing information. Remember, this is still a world where almost all queries are two words, not usually the best means of finding the most relevant results.
Does anyone want to help me hack the browsing problem?
is this.
I did as the parent suggested, and searched for "book moby dick", and all I got was links into the middle of the book. There is no link to jump to the beginning of the book. Had I the patience to click "Previous Page" 157 times, I could have started from the beginning. Blows chunks!
>> For instance, book origin of species will turn up the full text of Charles Darwin's controversial treatise
:)
Controversial? It's hasn't been controversial for decades, nor is it "just a theory", it's based on solid geological, anatomical, climatic evidence.
That book and its author are only controversial in creationist circles in the US, who apparently don't understand that if god does exist, evolution would be his doing anyway, and they insist in saying that the world was created by divine intervention and not by solid, tangible facts and processes (which could have been set up by god in the first place, if you need to believe that).
So, maybe Darwin is controversial for some deluded minds in that little world up there in North America, but the rest of the civilized world has already understood that the bible is based on metaphores and moved on to find "God" in other places. The alternative would be going back to the Dark Ages or ending up like most Islamic societies.
So maybe I'm just being picky and I would apologize, but I feel an itch everytime people refer to Darwin as controversial.
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
Yeah, the biggest benefit of a printed doc is that I can take it to the toilet and digest it while sitting on the throne for an hour. For whatever reason that's where I can absorb the most, and I sit there for an hour not because my biological functions require it, but because I get lost in reading and relaxing. It's hard to do the same thing with laptops, they are too clunky in your lap compared to 5 pages of printed paper, or even fat books. I haven't tried these tablet pc's, mostly cuz of the expense, but as soon as they are affortable and are as comfortable as 5 sheets of printed paper, I won't be needing to destroy trees anymore. If it had 1 GB of ram, and a USB2 port to which to attach my portable 40Gig drive, where all the ebooks reside, then I'm happy. Question is then, how much do ebooks cost. If they cost 2 bux a piece that's one thing, 10 bux a piece is quite another.
Statistics with Mathematica (book list)
... - 230 pages ... - 412 pages
... - by Martin Fink - 272 pages ... - 692 pages
... - 692 pages ... - 404 pages
... - by Gary Westfahl - 176 pages
Mars (book planet)
book dict:
Python Programming With the Java Class Libraries - by Richard Hightower - 640 pages
C++ Standard Library - by Nicolai M Josuttis - 832 pages
Unit Testing in Java - by Johannes Link, Peter Frohlich - 376 pages
Book results for python
Python - by Chris Fehily, Cliff Vick - 440 pages
Learning Python - by Mark Lutz - 591 pages
Programming Python - by Mark Lutz - 1256 pages
Book results for perl
Programming Perl - by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant - 1092 pages
Learning Perl - by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix - 320 pages
Perl Cookbook - by Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington - 927 pages
Book results for perl object
Programming Perl - by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant - 1092 pages
Programming the Perl Dbi - by Alligator Descartes, Tim Bunce - 362 pages
Genomic Perl - by Rex A. Dwyer - 334 pages
book galactic:
Book results for galactic
Galactic Astronomy - by James Binney, Michael Merrifield - 850 pages
The Formation of Galactic Bulges - edited by C Marcella Carollo, Henry C Ferguson,
Hot Stars in the Galactic Halo - edited by Saul J Adelman, Carol J Adelman, A R Upgren,
Book results for gpl
The Business and Economics of Linux and Open
Citrus Processing - by Dan A Kimball - 473 pages
Running Linux - by Matt Welsh, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer,
Book results for linux
Running Linux - by Matt Welsh, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer,
Hardening Linux - by John Terpstra, Paul Love, Ronald P Reck,
Linux Unwired - by Roger Weeks, Edd Dumbill, Brian Jepson - 297 pages
Book results for imsai
A History of the Personal Computer - by Roy A Allan - 528 pages
Book results for "apple ii"
Revolution in the Valley - by Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare - 291 pages
A History of the Personal Computer - by Roy A Allan - 528 pages
Inside Intuit - by Suzanne Taylor, Kathy Schroeder - 304 pages
Book results for "van vogt"
The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction - edited by Edward James, Farah Mendlesohn - 326 pages
Science Fiction, Children's Literature, and
American Science Fiction and the Cold War - by David Seed - 225 pages
Keep up the good work pushing the envelope!
Please scan Perry Rhodan in English (#128 and higher). It is the most popular book ever I think in Germany besides the Bible, and is out of print in English. There are a thousand (really) episodes and we need to search it! Also to help learn a foreign language. Where's the science fiction!!!
But wait: the demand is higher for "The Nature of the Chemical Bond"! Shouldn't economies of scale bring down the cost of the book?
It's amazing the way that true believers in free market doctrine can stick to the doctrine in the face of any quantity of real world evidence... is it an economic theory, or a religion?
for your possible interest
Declan
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/n ature/journal/v434/n7032/full/434425a_fs.html/
News
Nature 434, 425 (24 March 2005); doi:10.1038/434425a
France takes on Google in scanning race
DECLAN BUTLER
Jacques Chirac calls for proposals to digitize Europe's libraries.
[PARIS] French president Jacques Chirac instructed his government last week to come up with proposals for digitizing the collections of libraries in France and other European countries.
His statement, issued on 16 March, asked Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, France's minister of culture, and Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, to come up with proposals to accelerate the dissemination of French and other European works on the Internet. He called on France and Europe to take "a major role" in a "vast digitization of knowledge".
Chirac's move is widely interpreted as a response to Google's announcement late last year that it intends to scan millions of library books -- primarily from collections at the universities of Harvard, Stanford, Michigan and Oxford, as well as that of the New York Public Library -- over the next ten years. But this plan is being viewed with trepidation by backers of existing, public-domain projects that aim to do the same kind of thing.
One backer of the public-domain approach is Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive project, based in San Francisco. In December, Internet Archive teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University, the Library of Congress American Memory Project and universities in Canada, Egypt, India, China and Europe to digitize 9 million books over the next four years. More than 50,000 of them will be digitized by the end of this month.
Kahle says that the Google project could have three possible outcomes. The first is that funding for public-domain projects could dry up, with library collections effectively being privatized by Google. Alternatively, the Google move might result in healthy competition and an increased demand for a public-domain service, Kahle says. He cites as a precedent the human genome project, where the private company Celera's plans to sequence the genome galvanized the public consortium's determination to deliver its own version. The third possibility, Kahle says, is that Google might collaborate successfully with the public-domain efforts.
The Internet Archive's annual administrative costs of about $2 million are met by grants from the US National Science Foundation, the Library of Congress, national archives such as those in Britain and France, and philanthropists such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. But its scanning costs -- which could amount to $230 million over four years -- are due to be paid by participating libraries. There is now "fear, uncertainty and doubt" over this, says Kahle, with some libraries "waiting to see if they can get a handout from Google" instead.
Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg -- the first ambitious attempt to digitize libraries, launched in 1971 and based in Urbana, Illinois -- expresses concern about the proprietary nature of the Google project. He fears that his and other public projects could be hurt if funders think Google can do the job alone.
A public effort is essential, argues Hart, because it should provide users with access to the full text of books and high-quality images that they can use in whatever way they wish, without restriction. In contrast, Google's current system allows users to search texts online and to browse images, but provides access to only a small portion of the texts.
However, Raj Reddy, a computer scientist who is the founder and director of the Universal Digital Library at Carnegie Mellon University, welcomes the competition from Google, and says that, if anything, it should inc