In support of New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park event, Google Books has created a nice landing page aggregating the complete works of the author. What better use could there be for Google Booksearch? What could better improve the PR of the controversial opt-out system for in-copyright books that Google has set up? To be fair, its search results won’t display the full text of books unless they are out of copyright. [For clarification on this, see the comment below from Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch.]
The forthcoming Windows Live Booksearch announced last week a partnership with the Universities of California and Toronto and that program will take an opt-in approach to indexing copyrighted works, meaning that most rights holders will have to submit the works before they are included in the Live.com database.
These two big players will be competing soon for all your book-searching needs. Expect Google to come up with more themed offerings and simple, elegant project pages.
While I can’t say that I completely agree with Google’s strategy, it’s probably going to be the winner in the long run. All though I admit I can’t wait to see how successful Microsoft’s is.
This was a great idea — back when Steve Jobs had it in 1991 on the Next!
Thanks to the NYC public library, without which, this project would never be possible! I spoke with a few of the staff librarians whilst there in January (out from the Bay) and was fascinated by the tedium and time-intensive nature of logging all that incredibly rich content. Hats off. Information is power. -LAL
First, “its” not “it’s”.
Second, why doesn’t Google Books do some interesting things with the data it has — figure out ways to see how books are related, etc…
h, thanks and good point. more sophisticated offerings would be interesting, but I think things like this could get a lot of use in large part because of its simplicity.
To be clear, Google operates two systems. The Google Book Search publisher program is entirely opt-in. Rights holders submit books and decide how much they want to show. That’s been non-controversial. The Google Book Search library program is the controversial portion, where books are scanned for indexing, but as you say, no full text display is done unless publishers specifically opt-in.
“Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall”
Nice, but useless. You can’t download any of the books – you can only read them on the google website. They’re not even in text!
I really don’t think that books in electronic will really get too big an audience unless someone comes up with a cheap and simple e-book reader which is as simple to use as a real book (and small enough for you to snuggle up in bed with).
A very interesting way to present existing Google information resources in service to a particular kind of content. Should we now expect a mini-profession of Google content organizers – rogue librarians and scholars? – to spring up in order to receive ongoing mini-commissions (based on topic-related advert, etc. follow-up) as a result of their topic assembly and subsequent enrichment?
For students this is cool. Imagine you’ve got an exam tomorrow and you left your book at school. Or you need to find a quote, and its surrounding text. simple.
What would be interesting to do would be develop a web 2.0 app that scans students work (using google print, for free) to find plagiarism.
In response to the concerns about copyright etc. I bet Google are glad they didn’t do an online archive of music cd’s. Imagine the court cases.
It doesn’t really matter what use it has, just that it’s freely available like this from a reliable provider is what we need. Very cool.
Danny – thanks for the details.
LA- thanks for pointing out the work of librarians in this. Librarians totally deserve as much credit as they can get in this world.
RH – I think that’s very possible. Information overload is such that I imagine there will be countless new trades emerging for people especially skilled at dealing with it. Your idea is an interesting one!
Much slicker than most of what I’ve seen from Google lately. It does represent a sort of progress, despite their mercenary capitalist intent
[sarcasm] Wow, this tool is incredibly novel and useful. Where else could I find the collected works of William Shakespeare. I am shocked that no other website has bothered to tackle this immense problem. Google really is finding new uses for the internet. [/sarcasm]
Project Gutenberg
Who is Marshall Kirkpatrick?
Hi Sam, more on that in a bit
“Hi Sam, more on that in a bit
”
what does that mean? just tell us…
Mike has said that he plans to write a post about me and my new role here soon (looks like it needs to come sooner than later!), but as he wrote in the one year anniversary post “More recently, Marshall Kirkpatrick has joined and will be taking a big part of the writing load off of my back (more on that in a future post).”
The short answer is that I am a blogger and consultant who lives in Oregon. When I move to Portland, Oregon in a few weeks I’ll post here about a Portland get together, I’ll see if I can get Mike to come and we’ll make it a TechCrunch party.
My prior gig was writing the Social Software Weblog at Weblogs Inc. I also do interviews with tech and nonprofit Web 2.0-style innovators for the SF-based nonprofit tech assistance project NetSquared.org. My personal blog is Marshallk.com. The Web 2.0 topic closest to my heart is RSS, in case you were wondering. I’ll get on Mike today to write a post about me!
I had hoped and imagined that Google Book Search–whose goals I entirely support–would do something really cool with a Shakespeare page.
Instead we get odd, random editions of the plays, or a choice of “all editions,” which throws the kitchen sink at the reader, or, more exactly, assorted and incomplete parts of a whole bunch of sinks. I also don’t understand why they didn’t include the poems.
I can’t imagine this page being much help to casual readers, who will almost certainly need help. And a well-informed reader of Shakespeare will find other, much better done sites.
In short, apart from its being a marketing stunt, what is it for?
One final thing: it may be that the limitations imposed on Google Book Search are so overly restrictive that they don’t allow for a decent topic- or author-focused search page. If that’s the case, that’s really too bad.
The debate about google’s library project is compelling and may shape the idea’s of fair use in a digital age. I recorded the debate at the Los Angeles Library on Monday. I should have the audio up by tommorrow.
Check out the debate hosted by wired:
http://sfadayin...fe.blogspot.com
i just read that mlk’s entire personal writings are for auction at sotheby’s. google should buy them and do this. for real
Now this is really neat – publishing literary works out of copyright and allowing the user to download and print as they wish. I’m amazed no-one has beaten Google to this one – or maybe they have and their efforts have been forgotten whn the big players moved in.
hi!
i have a good audio systems on my website http://car-audio.org.md