Here is yet another service which I am very enthusiastic about: Google Print. A part of it will make books with elapsed copyrights and those in the public domain available in electronic form -- in full. It will all be fully searchable. Here is the announcement in Google blog. To illustrate the point that the whole thing will be searchable, this post gives the following example: In an old book, you can use the search facility to find for yourself that in 1855, the list of wealthy people in New York had more grocers than bankers!
In another post, Google blog has re-published an op-ed in Wall Street Journal written by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; Schmidt uses this op-ed to answer some of the publishers' misgivings about Google Print.
6 Comments:
Nothing beats reading a book in its paper form. But the electronic database can always be usual to many.
Prithi,
Nothing prevents you from printing it out, either!
With Google Print, the entire book is searchable in a way that has no analogue in a real book!
Actually a9.com, Amazon's service has been doing it for a while. I wonder what's the fuss over Google when a similar service already exists. The only thing amazon does differently is that it takes your credit card number. So you can make the case, however debatable, that at least there is an intent to purchase.
Ashok, I have heard of A9, and Amazon's book search, but I have never used it. But, isn't it only meant for books that Amazon sells? If so, Google's stuff is different in the sense that Google wants to make everything -- currently (and only currently) defined as those that are in many big, famous universities' libraries -- available digitally.
This is my current understanding. Please do correct me if this is not correct.
Yes. I think you are right. And that's a crucial distinction.
Google Bookseach is very important, it makes finding research so much quicker. Scanning every book for the internet is the future and should not be held back by publishers that have lack of vision.
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