Friday, August 12, 2005

Google Print

After reading a boing boing post about it, I decided to check out Google Print. At first I was very excited by what it had to offer and the power of it. Type in the words you want google to search, and it finds books with what you want. Excitement however quickly gave way to frustration as I tried to skim some of the material that it had found on the regarding "osteology of the reptiles." When looking at the text of a book, it is only possible to view three pages without doing a separate search for the next page. Also, no matter what I tried, I found it impossible to produce any search results for books that were no longer copyrighted. I tried Authors that have been dead for 100 years, titles that have been out of print for 50, esoteric topics only interesting to 10,000 people in the whole world. But alas, all of it was copyrighted. What I would really like to see is a search option along the lines of "copyrighted" or "not copyrighted" with all of the bothersome restrictions taken off the non copyrighted material. Furthermore, there are many titles which don't have to fall under restictions, but do anyway. To my knowledge, any publisher can pump out copies of "Dracula," "A picture of Dorian Grey," "Great Expectations," the complete works of Mark Twain and many many others without consiquence, so why can't a totally unrestricted version be available on Google Print?

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