Google Book Search Opens Trove Of Rare Books

New York Times:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase "you're not the boss of me." Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.

But while using Google's book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story contained in "The Church," a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

Ever since Google began scanning printed books four years ago, scholars and others with specialized interests have been able to tap a trove of information that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of libraries and in antiquarian bookstores.

According to Dan Clancy, the engineering director for Google book search, every month users view at least 10 pages of more than half of the one million out-of-copyright books that Google has scanned into its servers.

Read the whole story: New York Times

Comments

[Retrofuturistic]

Very cool. I have been looking for =The Letters of Heloise and Abelard= for years. Couldn't get it through inter-library loan.

Guess what? It's on there.... (Yay.)

[larry278]

Are there any estimates of what it might cost to have each page scanned & made into a hard copy? How about recreating a book from scanned hard copies of an op book's pages & having it bound? If it isn't copyrighted, you would not need to pay for the right to reproduce the book. Some us prefer to read a hard copy rather than as scan of a work on a monitor's screen.

[slobone]

I'm having trouble finding titles where the full book is available online, except a couple of things I already downloaded from Gutenberg. But it's somewhat better to have actual scanned pages, which Gutenberg doesn't offer.

[slarabee]

Google books is as a great research tool. It is good to talk about it because there are a lot of publishers that have sued them and have tried to prevent what they are trying to do.
Thank you Google.

[Mat8675]

Been using this for a while as well. It is a fantastic service, that can only get better as they add more titles.

[PuppaX]

This isn't new.

[shengirl]

I agree, I've been using this for research and reading fascinating old books for ages.

[westtexasboy]

True, but there'll be a lot of folks who do not know about the project.

[cjk002]

To a lot of people it is (I had heard about it but I didn't know it was available yet), and stories about how it's being used are extremely relevant and interesting to at least some of us.

If it makes you feel better to proclaim that you are on the cutting edge then go ahead, but understand that nobody really cares.