Book Search Category Archive
Amazon Dropping Search Inside The Book?
I am very disappointed to see that Amazon seems to no longer have the Search Inside The Book feature. Clued into this loss by Marydee's post yesterday, I can no longer even get Marydee's workarounds of going to the Canadian or British versions of Amazon to work. So what's missing? No more Search Inside the Book arrows on certain cover shots None of the text statistics and ability to search within a book on those books A search on a unique term like tilinca which only occurs in the contents of books now gets no results. No Look Inside excerpts...
Book Searching Page Added
I've been meaning to add a page to help keep track of some of the book search engines -- those that search the full text of digitized books, not book store searches -- and now I have finally added a book searching page. You can also view my presentation on book searching that I gave last week at the Computers in Libraries 2007 conference in DC. I plan on expanding the analysis and trying some more in-depth comparisons of these tools in the future....
Bowker, Live, and Geo Books
Last week, Bowker announced an agreement with Microsoft that its Global Books In Print database will be used for "basic and value-added data that will enhance descriptions of books incorporated in the new Live Search Books." Considering that Live Books are primarily out-of-print, out-of-copyright books and that Global Books In Print covers, surprise, in-print books, it would be interesting to know how many matches between the two are found. I have yet to see any examples. Today, Google announces the addition of geographic data to its books. Books are analyzed for place names and a Google Map with a list...
More Copyright Controversy with Google Books
I'm somewhat surprised that I've not heard more librarians complaining about this. I had not really considered all the ramifications about it. Philipp Lenson on Google Blogoscoped posts about Freeing Google Books. Basically, he notes that Google scans public domain books available from libraries and then appears to add further restrictions for those books including restricting commercial republication and the removal of the "digitized by Google" mark. Since that bothered him, he has pulled 100 titles from Google Books and "set them free" on his own Authorama Public Domain Books site (with the "digitized by Google" mark removed)....
More Book Search News
Walt Crawford gives an extensive overview in his Open Content Archive (OCA) and Google Book Search update. It is an excellent summary of other comments and discussions over the past several months. Of course, as soon as he publishes this, stating "The Internet Archive includes 35,000 books scanned as part of OCA (as of early December)," the OCA adds a whole new collection and announces passing the 100,000 volume mark....
A News Search Showdown & $1 million to OCA
Wednesday, I came across an AP article about book searching, "Google Book-Scanning Efforts Spark Debate." It mentions a "$1 million grant to the Internet Archive, a leader in the Open Content Alliance, to help pay for digital copies of collections owned by the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art." The article also discusses concerns with Google's project. As interesting as this article is, it lead to an even more fascinating (to me, at least) comparison of news sources and news search engines....
Live Search Books
Last Tuesday, Microsoft announced the launch of Live Search Books. Consisting of copyright-free works, Live Search Books launches with a considerable collection. I have a more in-depth review in Information Today's NewsBreaks. In working on this story, I came across an interesting example of how some books may only be found at one service or the other....
New Google Book Viewer
Google has launched a new version of its book viewer in Google Book Search. See their take on the chances in the Inside Google Book Search blog post. You will only notice this once you click on a result, and in particular on a Full View or Limited Preview result. The Snippet view has changed a bit with the addition of 'Key words and phrases' at the top and a 'Contents' section and some other additional information depending on the book record. But take a look at a Full View or Limited Preview record to see significantly more differences. The...
O'Leary on Google Book Search
Mick O'Leary has an excellent overview "Google Book Search Has Far to Go" for his Nov. column in Information Today. In particular, he compares Google Books Search to Amazon's Search Inside the Book and notes that . . . Amazonâs feature has several critical advantages over Book Search. The most important is that Amazon has the latest books; Book Search does not. Perhaps because of differing licenses with the publishers, Book Search is often several years behind; Amazon has the latest releases and also lists forthcoming titles. For example, Amazonâs feature has the latest books by Pat Buchanan, James Lee...
Open Content Archive: Books Available
Since the announcement of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) back in Oct. 2005, I have been waiting to see the results of the project and view some of the scanned books. While the major search engine partners like Yahoo! and Microsoft have not yet launched any product, I noticed that the Internet Archive does have quite a few books already available in their Text Archive (over 30,000). Look at a record to see the rich meta data included (not just title, author, date, and publisher, but also language, contributor,call number , scan date, and image count). The book is available...
Cornell in for Live Book Search
Both Live and Cornell have announced that Cornell University is joining the Live Book Search project. As with such announcements from Google Book search, that means it will be awhile (perhaps a year or more) before any books from that library are available online. For that matter, Live Book Search is not yet available, although it is supposed to go live (no pun intended) later this year....
FreeTechBooks.com: A Directoryof Free CS and Programming Books
FreeTechBooks.com is a nicely organized directory of freely available programming and computer science books and lecture notes. The free books listed are usually available directly on the publisher's Web site. The classifications on the left side includes books in Computer Science, Operating Systems, Programming and Scripting, and Related Fields. A search box will search title and descriptions of the books but not their full text. Based on the numbers per category, it looks like it includes about 100-200 titles. While some of the titles are available via sources like The Online Books Page, others are not included there....
A9 Redesign and Feature Loss
Yesterday, A9 had a major redesign of its site along with a major accompanying loss of features. The A9 announcement notes that they have "redesigned the A9.com website to make it easier and quicker to discover information from more sources." It has more of a Web 2.0 look and feel, and I think they have achieved a more usable site. The databases are grouped together in the left column and are customizable. Searchers can build their own groups from the more than 400 source databases. Each column (one per database) now features continuous scrolling (like the beta of Live search...
More Library Links in Google Book Search
The Google Blog, in a post entitled "Find the wealth in your library" talks about the expansion of links to national library union catalogs at Google Books. More than 15 union catalogs are includes, not just Open WorldCat. It is not always easy to connect to each of these union catalogs, and I still find plenty of records without a "Find this book in a library" link, even when the books are listed in WorldCat. Gary makes some pointed comments as well....
Download Google Books and U Mich Access
An Information Today news break discusses last week's announcement from Google Books that for copyright-free books, users can now download a full PDF of the book. Even more interesting is the report of the availability of some of these scanned books from with the University of Michigan's online catalog, MIRLYN. Some of the government publications which Google only shows in snippet view are available in full text via Michigan. The problem is to find these. Try going to MIRLYN, click on the Advanced Search link near the top, change the Format limit to "electronic resources," and then you might find...
Chinese Book Search
Search Engine Watch reports on a People's Daily article about Google's plans to launch a book search service in China. Meanwhile, Baidu has announced a plan to integrate book catalog records into its search engine reports Shanghai Daily. "Baidu.com, has signed an agreement with the mainland's top libraries to include their catalogues on its search site, making it the largest Chinese books database in the world." Perhaps, but it is not a full text database if it only includes library catalog records....
Statistically Improbable Phrases at Amazon
Seen intermittently earlier in March, Amazon now has Statistically Improbable Phrases or SIPs displayed in its book records when they also have Search Inside the Book access to the full text....
Books and Libraries in Google
In keeping with a sudden frenzy of new initiatives, Google is now starting to include records and extracts from published books along with a few connections into library holdings information. These two initiatives are currently separate from each other, and since they are both experimental, they may change or stop appearing at any time. Neither one tends to show up in search results very often, but here are a few links to see what they look like. First, the Google Print inside the book content, which is not as useful as the Amazon Search Inside the Book since it only...
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