http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/apmethods/apstory?urlfeed=D8DKV9M8E.xml http://www.print.google.com
Full text? That could potentially be VERY BIG. There must be countless old books sitting in major libraries whose copyrights have expired. Just think of the massive scholarly literature of the 19'th century. For subjects like history, philosophy, religious studies or classics, where writing doesn't become outmoded as fast as it does in the sciences, many of those older works are still going to be extremely valuable. What's more, these books are long out of print and probably very hard to locate today. I wasn't aware that Google Print was up and running. http://www.print.google.com Apparently right now it's kind of a browsing service. They allow you to search the full text of the books that they've scanned and to receive excerpts and references to the entire work, without full-text (which involves copyright problems). While falling far short of full-text, that's still a significant service, depending on how many books and periodicals are searchable. (That's growing all the time, I guess.) It will really help graduate students doing literature searches and may eventually replace all those library abstracts. (I expect that they will eventually allow full-text downloads of copyright material as well, but that will probably be a fee-based or subscription service that retains royalties to authors.) Here's how they describe the current browsing-service offerings: What can I do once I've found a book I like? Search again: Find more results for your original search terms in other parts of the book, or try a new search within the book. Find reviews: Choose "About this Book," then click "Web search for reviews" to find online reviews of the book. Find related information: Choose "About this Book" and click on "Other web pages related to …" to find other websites that mention the book. Learn about the publisher: Click through to the publisher’s website to find more books from that publisher. Buy this book: Click on one of the online booksellers to go to directly to a page where you can buy the book. Find it in a Library: If this book is a library book, you'll be able to find a local library that has it by clicking "Find it in a Library" and entering your zip code. http://print.google.com/intl/en/googleprint/about.html
If they indexed it.... First, I'm glad this is available. Second, boy I sure wish that they'd make some of these works available in text, HTML, PDF or some other format. I know that they're having all sorts of issues with the copyright issue, but they've scanned a lot of books that are indisputably in the public domain, and I wish they would make those works as accessible as possible to individuals or at least to Project Gutemberg. If they indexed it, the text is there... somewhere. Free it! It would certainly be of great interest to the Free Curricula Center to have all those works available for possible revision into texts relevant to today's students. Some of those old books are more useful than you'd think. -=Steve=-
