Google Betas Google Print

Chronic Infection writes "Google is beta testing a book search service called Google Print. Here is a list of books included to date." Quick spot checking turned up excerpts like this one for The DaVinci Code, a great book if you haven't read it.

Page rank in books?

[Karamchand]

Quote from Google Print FAQ [google.com]: During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites.

Now I wonder how this is done. Google's PageRank uses links from other pages to rank results - but in usual books there aren't any "hyperlinks".
Could anyone offer me insight into this? - thanks!

Interesting for now, but when do we get a d.l.?

[medication]

This is definitely a step in the right directions, but it's just that - a step. I'd really love to have access to a digital library (d.l.) in much the same I have access to one in the real world. I wonder if Ben Franklin came under as severe commercial pressure as those who are trying to push for a digital library available to all?

Wow how useful 53 books

[glassesmonkey]

Currently there are 52 books in this database. (Use this google search [google.com])

But it is an interesting idea. And might yield more useful results for information seeing as the bar for publishing a book is a little higher than getting a webpage listed in google.

Re:Page rank in books?

[arvindn]

There wouldn't be any links pointing out of them, but there would be links pointing into them. Which is all that's required to calculate PageRank. What I understood is that, they plan to put up a sample chapter or something as html and look at the inbound links that it gets.

Where are you getting 52/53?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the first Slashdot search [google.com], I see 9990, of which a few aren't books. In your search [google.com] I see 6530, although after page 9 it says stuff is repeated, so maybe there's only 900+ books. Regardless, many more than 52 or 53.

Brilliant for research

[mr_lithic]

This seems similar to the large research indexes that I used to find books and articles on certain subjects.

They were not as detailed as this or as comprehensive but if this actually gets going, it will be an incredible aid to researchers. Currently, only about a small percentage of the information I use is on the web. Most of it is in libraries and research collections and is difficult to access.

This will provide information on which books and papers (if periodicals are included) I need to start getting a hold of for my research.

Man, students these days have it easy!

Yes, yes.

[sethadam1]

I have read every Dan Brown book and many Jane Austen books. I don't know why I feel like a pussy when I tell people that I love Jane Austen stories, probably because they are all pretty much the same chick-flick kind of story: a lower-middle class adolescent woman in fear of becoming a spinster finds the right man but he does not reciprocate the interest, so she suffers in silence rather than confess her love for him and when proposed marriage from another well-to-do man, even if it puts her, undeservingly, in the right spot of society, rejects it because her principles do not allow for her to enter into a loveless marriage but it all ends up okay, because the man she loves comes around in the end. Tweak a few details, like in P&P, and you have a Jane Austen story to be sure.

Dan Brown's best book, IMHO, is Digital Fortress. I read it one night between 11:30 and 6:00 AM. I couldn't put it down. It will DEFINITELY cater to this crowd - it's really a great book. If you want to get into DB, I recommend you read them in order - Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, and Davinci.

If you're looking for Grail lore - check out Holy Blood, Holy Grail. If you're looking for incredible stories about the Catholic Church, check out The Christ Conpiracy.

All, of course, my two cents.

Questia has done something similar for years...

[willith]

Questia [questia.com] does somthing similar--they've digitized ~60,000 books, chosen by a panel of librarians for their scholarly value (mostly liberal arts titles), and allow full-text searches of the entire library. Questia is marketed as a tool for writing research papers--the service keeps track of what books you've looked at and will automatically build a bibliography and do your citations for you in the format of your choice.

They use an indexing system similar to Google's to keep full-text searches of the library in the sub 1 second range, and the whole thing is pretty slick. Searches are free, and they show the book, publishing info, and the page number of the search result. To actually see the text, though, you have to be a subscriber.

Footnotes and citations are live-linked to their referenced sources, if those sources are in the Questia library, and every book is stored in XML, which keeps the original pagination (including illustrations). A neat side-effect of the XML tagging is that you can search for implicit things (like themes or genre or subgenre) as well as explicit things (keywords). Questia spent the better part of two years securing the rights of each and every book on the service, but it really is a cool idea.

Disclaimer--I worked for Questia for a couple of years, although I left in 2001.