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Filed under: Internet, Text, Utilities, Windows, Web services, Google, Freeware

Free app downloads any Google Book Search item as PDF

Windowsby Lee Mathews Feb 19th 2009

Google's Book Search already provides PDF download links for all the public domain title it indexes, like the works of William Shakespeare. It's a handy way to peruse titles later when you don't have high speed internet access available.

Suppose you want to check out a title like the February 1976 version of Ebony Jr. Then what?

You could manually browse it one page at a time and save each image, or you could fire up Google Book Downloader and let it do the heavy lifting. Locate a title in Book Search and find its code in the URL (http://books.google.com/books?id=ub4DAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_hpmagazines). Copy and paste it into Book Downloader, and select what you want to save.

Press save selected, and Book Downloader will automatically combine the saved images into a PDF for you to read later.

Edit: forgot to mention earlier, .Net 3.5 is required.

[via Google Operating System]

Tags: books, google-book-search, pdf, reading

Filed under: Internet, Google, Mobile

Google offers 1.5 million public domain books for your mobile phone

by Brad Linder Feb 6th 2009

Google Book Search MobileGoogle has been scanning books for the last couple of years for the company's Book Search portal. Well over a million of those books are in the public domain, which means that Google can legally make the full text available online without running into any copyright issues. And this week the company upped the game by creating a mobile portal which basically means you can read any of those books on your computer or mobile phone.

The new Book Search mobile portal is optimized for touchscreen devices like the iPhone or Google Android devices. But you can use it to find and read books on any internet connected device. I grabbed this screenshot using a desktop web browser.

1.5 million books are available to US readers, and over half a million of those books are available internationally. Many of the books are classics that were written long ago and which are no longer covered by copyright. But there are also some newer texts that have entered the public domain for one reason or another.

As Google points out, some of the books may contain errors, since the optical character recognition technology used to convert the scanned images to text is far from perfect. And Google added a neat trick that lets you see the original scanned image when you select any chunk of text.

Have you found anything interesting or surprising in the book list? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: google-book-search, mobile, public-domain

Filed under: Internet, Google, Search, Web

Find and read magazines online with Google Book Search

by Brad Linder Dec 9th 2008

Google Book Search magazines
Google's efforts to digitize the world's book collection have drawn the ire of some book publishers. So what's the next step? Digitizing magazines of course. Nobody ever got in trouble for doing that, right?

But seriously, Google has announced that working with publishers, the company has digitized current and back issues of magazines including Ebony, Popular Science, and New York Magazine. You can find magazines by searching by title. Or you can conduct keyword searches using Google Book Search and magazine results will show up alongside results from books.

Google says it has begun to digitize millions of articles, but there are a ton of popular magazines that are not included in the index, presumably because Google hasn't yet been able to negotiate an agreement with the publishers.

Tags: google-book-search, magazines, mygazines

Filed under: Internet, Google, Microsoft, Search

Open Content Alliance takes on Microsoft and Google Book Search

by Brad Linder Oct 22nd 2007

Open Content AllianceSure, Google and Microsoft may talk about ambitious plans to make the full text of every book available online for searching and reading. But the New York Times reports that some major research libraries aren't happy with the terms offered by Microsoft and Google.

In the past, we'd heard a lot of complaints from book publishers who alleged that Google was violating their copyrights. But these research institutions are taking an almost opposite stance. They say they want to make sure books are available to widest possible audience. But Microsoft and Google each require publishers to promise their books won't be available through other commercial book search services.

Instead, these groups are signing up with the Open Content Alliance. The Open Content Alliance is a nonprofit group dedicated to creating a publicly accessible library of digitized books. The group was started 2 years ago. So far it looks like the OCA is a bit behind Microsoft and Google. There's no searchable OCA web site yet. But the group does offer an alternative for research institutions that aren't happy with Microsoft and Google's offerings.

While prominent libraries including the New York Public Library, Harvard, and the University of Michigan have already signed up with Google, last month 19 New England area research and academic institutions including the University of Connecticut and the University of Massachusetts announced they would work with the OCA. Those 19 institutions have a total of 34 million works whose copyrights have expired, making them ideal candidates for digitization.

The Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and about 80 other organizations have already signed up with OCA.

Tags: book-search, google-book-search, microsoft-book-search, open-content-alliance

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