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.

Out of print

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.

Re:Out of print

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.

Re:Out of print

When people stop equating Shakespeare's timeless epics with 7th grade, simply because it's the only time they were 'made' to 'hobble through' some of the greatest writing of all time, then I'll be excited.

Alas, poor Yorick...
OMGWTF, it's GRENDEL!

Re:Out of print

What about Linux assembly language?

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/ [nongnu.org]

Or, you can buy a printed version from here [cafeshops.com].

The next issue of Free Software Magazine [freesoftwaremagazine.com] will likely have a list of many of the good free books available.

Re:Out of print

Out of print, copyrighted, whatever. This is how google has chosen to deal with the subject:

Thank you for using Google Print.

You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.

Google protects works that are under copyright by restricting access to certain pages and restricting the number of pages you can view. You may continue to take advantage of Google Print by clicking on About this Book. Thank you for using Google Print.

I had thought that they were putting "books" online. Turns out they're just putting the ability to search through books online.

BTW, this came up when I hit next page too many times on "Origin of Species" who's original text, I presume, is not copyrighted.

TW

Re:Out of print

I might be wrong about this, but I think that the copyright might be in relation to the text (appearing to) having been scanned from a book printed in 1996.

For Google to offer it for free would mean that they'd have to scan it from a printed source which is also out of copyright??

Well, I think that's the case....

Anyone who says they fully understand copyright is either a fool or a liar... or worse. ;-)

Re:Out of print

Project Gutenburg is a pretty good source for copyright info. Here's what he has to say:

FAQ entry on books with updated copyright dates [gutenberg.org]

So there you go.

It's my understanding that they can't re-copyright the actual text. However, they can copyright the presentation, line editting, page breaks and whatnot. So you could take the actual text from them, you couldn't take the text in that presentation from them.

Fun huh?.

Kirby

Public Domain can't be copyrighted

I work a lot with putting copyright materials online. See /http://yosemite.ca.us/history/ [yosemite.ca.us] I get a lot of resistience from librarians, but that's another story. Only original material can be copyrighted. For a reprinted book, for example, that would be new introductions or new art. It would not minor editing or line breaks. A federal court found that high-quality photographs of art do not have copyright protection. They were considered "slavish copies," without any additional creativity. Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191, 1999 (S.D.N.Y. 1999).

That said, it's always better to reproduce from an early printing, and not a new printing, to avoid any question of copyright.

Re:Now the question is...

...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.

I'll never read online

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.

Re:Now the question is...

With all of these great works online, will the masses bother to read them?

Do they read those from Project Gutenberg? [gutenberg.org] 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.

ebookwise 1150 is the way to go

http://www.ebookwise.com/ebookwise/ebookwise1150.h tm

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/idiotprogra mmer/?p=83398151

textbooks

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

Re:textbooks

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

Here's a less popular viewpoint, at least amongst professors.

Quit using your class to sell your textbook.

Look, I don't care how many PhD's you have in Math, your personal Calculus textbook is no different than any other. 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!

Students wouldn't have to pay $120 a textbook if the professors didn't want it to be that way.

Re:textbooks

At $130 retail price, the professor is probably taking half or $50.
A typical royalty is about 10 [textbookpublisher.com] to 12 [weber.edu] 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 [weber.edu]. 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

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:one cliche, one other

You got modded down because you recommended books that the mods hadn't read, and it hurt their feelings.

Let me join you.

I recommend Homer. The Iliad or The Odyessy are two of the greatest books ever written, start with the Odyssey.

Following in the grand-parent posts' steps, I can recommend Timequake by Vonnegut as an underrated book. But back to the public domain.

Aristiophanes is the only comedian as funny as Monty Python, check him out though you'll have to read up on your mythology and other Greek lit. But there is nothing like Aristophanes, he is outrageous. Lysystrata [The Breaker of Armies] is placed in the [historical] war between Athens and Sparta, and the women of Greece declare a sex strike till peace is made.

I've also enjoyed the Tragedians (Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus), you'd think they are boring but it's pithy and exciting exciting, nothing near as depressing as Million Dollar Baby.

In fact, check out any of the Greco-Roman stuff, you'll be blown away.

Highlighting is annoyuing

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.

Re:As is not being able to access a specific page

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 [google.com] this way. I'd continue further, but I value my sanity.

Re:Highlighting is annoyuing- google the ISBN #

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

Re:Highlighting is annoyuing

On that note, how do you jump to a specific page?

There are some features that are apparently only possible by editting the URL. The user interface could use some work.

I'm getting the strong impression that Google does not want you actually reading entire works through this service.

popular public domain classics are already online

A lot of these books have been available online (and easily findable via search engines) for years, courtesy of Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] 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.

Copyrighted material?

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

Get around context menus

You can get around the disabled context menus, but it involves a little bit of sifting through the html. For example this [google.com] 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"?

Holy copyright imbroglio!

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

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.

Re:Holy Bible?

Probably because it isn't just called the Holy Bible in the collection.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=book+King +James&btnG=Search [google.com]

However, I'm pretty sure you were just trolling.... Otherwise you would look for a specific VERSION of the bible!

Re:Holy Bible?

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

Re:Holy Bible?

It was one of the first books I checked for and amazingly "bible" and "the bible" do not yeild the desired results either.

That's what Christians get for naming their authoritative religious work "The Bible." All of you looking to start a new religion take note. Bad titles for your religious text include: The Book, The Writing, The Text, and The Bound Stack of Paper.

P.S. The number of older texts that include the word "bible" is similar to the number of contemporary works that include the word "book."

what full text???

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 Full-Text!

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 [gutenberg.org] is a great resource.

No copyright infringement...

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...

Oliver Twist is copyrighted?

Last I checked Oliver Twist [gutenberg.org] was written by Charles Dickens [wikipedia.org] 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. :)

*if*

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.

Plain Text Please

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).

"The origin of species"

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?

Controversial?

In most parts of the world, Origin of Species hasn't been controversial for well over a century.