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.
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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.
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.
...well. Will many people read them, on-line? Even working in the IT industry; even with good LCD monitors, laptops, eBooks and whatever I've still noticed a strong tendency (and one that I'm very guilty of) to destroy great swathes of forest to generate the paper to print out the on-line doc so I can digest it better.
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?
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!
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
Do they read those from Project Gutenberg? I'm not sure how many do.
While I get excited about the prospect of "free" literature, I find that I don't take advantage of it. The main reason is that I don't feel like reading a novel while sitting in front of the computer. This is especially difficult to do while sitting on the toilet, or on a plane or train, or on a toilet on a plane or a train. Sure, I could bring a laptop, but it's a lot more cumbersome than a paperback.
I've considered printing them out, but this would be much more expensive than just purchasing a paperback (or, in a lot of cases, hardback) edition, even using my antique laserjet. This might make some sense for rare OOP books, that's about it.
What we need is a really cheap, really good e-book reader that accepts multiple and non-proprietary formats.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
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
There is an interesting k5 article caled Hacking Google Print.
Check it out.
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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.
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.