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August 30, 2006

Google Allows Downloads of out-of-copyright Books

Michael Arrington

48 comments »

Google is adding a feature to its Google Books service today to allow PDF downloads of out-of-copyright books. For example, to download a pdf version of Dante’s Inferno, see the right sidebar of this page.

Until now, Google only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online (and only snippets of copyrighted works). To search the database of available full titles, go to books.google.com and click the “full view books” option when searching. This new move contradicts earlier statements by Google that scans of out-of-copyright books would not be made available for printing.

Many full view titles, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, don’t have the PDF option yet.

Project Gutenberg is already offering downloads of thousands of out-of-copyright books, although the formating is inconsistent and the interface is less than user friendly.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 1:32 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Aaron

    August 30th, 2006 at 2:25 am

    Very cool!!

  2. Razvan Antonescu

    August 30th, 2006 at 2:55 am

    It seems is US only…that sucks

  3. Razvan Antonescu

    August 30th, 2006 at 2:57 am

    Yes…US only…if you are outside US use their translate service and acts as a proxy http://www.google.com/translate_t

  4. PH Langlois

    August 30th, 2006 at 3:11 am

    Could be nice (for users, not editors) to have access to a list of these free pdf books.
    Could be nice for people who don’t read a lot and don’t know what to search. Browsing free books could help, encourage people to read.

  5. Rpblcn

    August 30th, 2006 at 3:11 am

    Google is definitely a company driven by freaking communists.

  6. bsr

    August 30th, 2006 at 3:48 am

    why us only? that’s rubbish.

  7. Jonathan

    August 30th, 2006 at 3:53 am

    I fail to see how this is “news”… Project Gutenberg has been doing this since the web became popular in the mid 1990s - and their site is nicely designed, easy to navigate, and even has spoken versions of books…

  8. Ashish Sinha

    August 30th, 2006 at 4:12 am

    Its not true that the service is for US only. I am able to download the PDFs (from India).

    The link that Michael has shared is somehow not showing the “Download” button. Click on “Back to search result” and you will be able to download the book.

    You can get a list of other free eBooks here

  9. Jon

    August 30th, 2006 at 4:13 am

    The Internet Archive ( http://www.archive.org ) has championed this effort and has made incredible progress (with Project Gutenberg as one of its many partners) - it’s sad to see it overshadowed by Google’s attempts. Still, I guess some competition is good for the consumer.

  10. Adam

    August 30th, 2006 at 5:13 am

    You may also want to check out Bartleby, essentially the same thing as Project Gutenberg, but with a much better design. http://www.bartleby.com/

  11. Emily

    August 30th, 2006 at 5:51 am

    That’s sounds a little cool :)
    Thanks for the info,Matt.

  12. NeoTechie

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:01 am

    Historically, human beings have prospered due the sharing of intellectual properties. Thank you for sharing Google.

    /*
    Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don’t care as much about attractive sites and pretty design. */

    ~Tim Berners-Lee

  13. Tomas Hodbod

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:05 am

    Yes, yes…I am able to download the PDFs (I’m from Czech) too.

  14. Blake P

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:07 am

    Looks like Google now have added the public libraries on their list of entities they want to dominate.

  15. R Crocker

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:37 am

    Hi,

    Obviously Google is going to get big public relations points out of its recent announcement to offer a bunch of books for free download. I thought I’d let you know about our thoughts on the books that Google has produced. Nutshell: great idea, but we wonder if anyone is actually going to make good use of the books. If Google makes a few updates to the books they publish then we reckon readers will benefit greatly.
    http://www.planetpdf.com/creat.....p;gid=7376

  16. Sasa

    August 30th, 2006 at 7:09 am

    When I click on download link i get

    Not Found
    The requested URL /sorry/?continue=http://books.google.com/books%3Fvid%3DLCCN16003547%26id%3DMmpPi9vAa4MC%26output%3Dpdf%26sig%3DiHHD_hRn91eiBJYaoaRwQ6pTAtc was not found on this server.

  17. Abhishek Goyal

    August 30th, 2006 at 7:36 am

    I can download it from india. Although the link in the blog does not work for me. A fresh search for “dante inferno” in “Full View Books” give me the page where i could find the Download button.

  18. Moses Ting

    August 30th, 2006 at 7:38 am

    I wonder if there’s an option to browse all available ‘full-text’ books, instead of having to perform a search.

  19. Peter

    August 30th, 2006 at 8:38 am

    wow - this is great - i think. barnes and noble and the others just had a very bad morning.

    i love hanging and barnes/borders, but will they be able to stick it out after Google continues to slam them? i wonder how much these free books made for the big boys? maybe not so much….

  20. Garry

    August 30th, 2006 at 9:49 am

    Wow… that is really interesting. I can see a few issues that might arise with this… might ruffle a few feathers if you know what I mean!

  21. Ryan W.

    August 30th, 2006 at 12:10 pm

    This is way over-hyped. There are already numerous other projects out there who are working to accomplish the same thing (although Google could trump them in terms of comprehensiveness, given their resources).

    And to all those predicting that this will hurt barnes and noble or that google will now “dominate” public libraries, have you really spent much time reading books in PDF format, especially when you could get the hardcopy for cheap (or free)? Most of these books can be obtained inexpensively and maybe it’s just me, but I just can’t see myself reading Dante’s Inferno on my laptop. Hardcopy books aren’t going anywhere just yet.

  22. Glenn Kelly

    August 30th, 2006 at 1:27 pm

    I’ve been checking out google books for a while now. It’s still a good start, but so many books that were written over 50 years ago are still unfortunately in copyright :(

  23. Vlad

    August 30th, 2006 at 4:09 pm

    Who the hell wants to read The Inferno, stupid layers of hell, lol had to read that in a humanities class in college, Boring, and hard to understand the words with the style of the writing.

  24. Cruncher

    August 30th, 2006 at 5:02 pm

    That was one horrible copy. In the pdf, you will see highlighting/undelining few places, you will see some folds and few places fonts are not clear.

    If this is how, the books they digitize are going to be - I would stay away from it.

  25. Phoenix

    August 31st, 2006 at 12:39 am

    Well I have personally been able to find a lot of pdf ebooks all over the internet. Non-copyright books are not difficult to find at all.

    On the contrary if google can take up an initiative to create an e-library for all users who can access books for a certain period of time without being able to make copies of it, then it would be grand! :)

  26. Yehudah Goldstein

    August 31st, 2006 at 1:42 am

    I don’t like PDF as web format.

  27. Tuggle

    August 31st, 2006 at 5:13 am

    Ahh, goodbye University library.

  28. Marcus

    August 31st, 2006 at 9:18 am

    That’s actually just an intro to Inferno that you’re linking to.. not Dante’s Inferno itself. :)

  29. samtsai

    September 4th, 2006 at 2:09 am

    Does that include music books?

  30. Vijay

    September 9th, 2006 at 6:51 am

    Realy good news.

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