Google Print

[Telos]

Good lord has anyone seen this yet?

http://print.google.com/

I had heard a year ago they were planning to do this but I didn't know it was live yet. It says it's still in beta, but, hey, everything in Google is perpetually in beta. I bet it's some kind of joke they have.

Anyways, a quick search of "lucid" or "lucid dream" or anything like that brought up a whole ton of books I've never seen before. They'll even allow you to read some of them - but not all, of course. Still, what can be read is still potentially very good.

[Hans Solo]

Simply amazing!

 Google has got their act together.  Anyone ever look at google maps?  Lets just hope that in the future these maps don't become real time.

Han

[mrloki]

that is a trip man...wow, a new way to find books I'm actually interested in, compared to walking around the bookstore for two hours and not find a thing

[Namra]

That is awesome.  I can now check to see how close my stories text are to others.  This will allow me to make my works even more original.  I can make it so that my stories have no lines that are in any other story.

In a story I actually predicted a technology similar to this would arise and by the year 2013 books would be written by computers all due to the creation of this technology.  So moral of my post is that I better enjoy this technology before my prediction becomes fact.

[clandestino]

google definitely has its act together.... !


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4247846.stm

[Ben K]

google- the next starbucks.

[WalkerInTheWoods]

I just looked at Google Print for a few minutes but I don't see anything amazing about it. Am I missing something? You can search for books on a subject you want? While Google Print makes it a little easier depending on what you want it is nothing that you could not have done before.

Check out Google Earth if you have not done so. That is pretty impressive.

[MisterJingo]

I think what is impressive is that it actually searches every word of every book it has indexed, rather than searching on book titles categorised. Watch the results it gives and you will see page numbers next to each find.

From searching the site it also looks that a form of optical character reading is used on scanned documents (the books) during the searches.

[WalkerInTheWoods]

Ok, I see what you are talking about. That is pretty cool, but being useful would depend on what you want to do. If I am looking for a book about a subject then it does not seem any more useful. If I am looking for book that contains several different subjects then I can see it's usefulness.

[Logic]

Google is being sued by the Guild of Authors, being one of the biggest copyright violations in history for starting this project - I for one now hate them for doing such a horrible thing. Allowing this would completly change written literature for worse, forever.

[Ybom]

Google is being sued by the Guild of Authors, being one of the biggest copyright violations in history for starting this project - I for one now hate them for doing such a horrible thing. Allowing this would completly change written literature for worse, forever.

I saw nothing about Google being sued by the Guild of Authors, and how is Google doing much of anything different than what Amazon does? Google is getting authorization from the publishers first before they show anything.

And secondly how is this project horrible? Change written literature for worse? I can most definitely look through a collection of my books, even some of the really good children's books, and not find any of them in any form (bookstore or internet) for additional copies anywhere. This is a good thing imo, most definitiely.

[ap]

Apparently it is true.  Unfortunately I can't get the link to work here, but if you go to yahoo search,(the article was on yahoo news), at the very top of the search results page by the red "y" it says "News Results for Google".  Listed under that catagory (2nd one down) you will find the news article.

[Ybom]

Yahoo News
Authors Guild News

I see it now, but it's not the "Guild of Authors" as I had searched for. It's in fact "Authors Guild". Just a minor miscommunication is all ^^