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>The thrilling thing about Google Books, it seemed to me, was not just the opportunity to read a line here or there; it was the possibility of exploring the ful
by yannis 11y ago
>The thrilling thing about Google Books, it seemed to me, was not just the opportunity to read a line here or there; it was the possibility of exploring the full text of millions of out-of-print books and periodicals that had no real commercial value but nonetheless represented a treasure trove for the public.
I had the same excitement as the author when Google Books came out. The service has stagnated over the years. Reading snippets is such a frustrating experience (you cannot even cut and paste the text). Even the books where one can buy an ebook is not available for some countries. Many times it is quicker to search on archive.org to find related books digitized by Microsoft.
We still have a long way to go where knowledge can be distributed at low cost and in abundance ...
- kuschku 11y agoThe guttenberg project has a lot of ebooks available for free, but only for public-domain books.
- fernly 11y agoIndeed Project Gutenberg[1] has for a number of years been putting out-of-copyright books online. They take great pains[2] to make sure the books are no longer in copyright. Another very important difference is that PG books are proofread by human beings and have a much, much lower rate of OCR errors than the bulk-scanned Google books which are, often, abysmally, disgustingly full of blatant scan errors, sometimes to the point of being unreadable. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page [2] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To