Thing 22: Books Online

For thing #22 we're going to look at a couple of eBook projects: Google Books and Project Gutenberg.
Google Books
Why Google Books? We all use Google. We use it at home; we use it at work. Did you know that besides searching the web, you can use Google for searching through the full text of books. Google Book Search aims to allow people to search all of the world's books. It offers full view options for many books in the public domain and preview (or snippet) view of others that still retain copyright. You can limit your search to full view if you only want to retrieve books that are completely available in digitized form.

Google has partnered with the University of Michigan, Oxford University, and other prestigious libraries to digitize their large collections as part of their Google Library Project whereby millions of books will be available to be searched online.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg's philosophy is to "make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search". It commenced in 1971 and now has over 28,000 books available from their website and over 100,000 books through their partners, affiliates and resources websites.

Copyright provisions vary depending on what country you are in: a book for which copyright has expired in one country may still be copyrighted in other countries.

Discovery Readings:

• About Google Book Search
• An alternative view of Google Books project from Boingboing
• About Project Gutenberg
• Project Gutenberg Australia

To finish Thing #22:

1. Visit Google Book Search. Try a sample search on a topic that interests you. Click on a book to view. Look at how you can explore the pages by browsing, the table of contents (if there is one), and searching within the book.
2. Repeat steps one and two on Project Gutenberg.
3. Create a blog post about your experience. What benefits does Google Book Search have for our libraries? What does it mean for extending access to information? What don't you like about this site? What are some of the copyright concerns? Let us know your thoughts.