From the Mailbag: Illustrating your point with a book

Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 10:49 AM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Book Search Online Team

Welcome to the latest edition of "From the Mailbag," where we respond to emails from Google Book Search users. This time our question comes from Dave:

I want to make a website on the Underground Railroad. I know that Google Books has a wealth of information from public domain books. Is there an API link for your books with that content?

Thanks for this great question, Dave. Helping users and researchers take advantage of the growing corpus of books and materials on Google Book Search is an important goal for our team. With this in mind, we offer tools that we hope will spark your creativity and let you interact with books in new ways.

As we posted earlier, Google Book Search offers a number of ways to allow retailers, publishers, and anyone with a web site to embed books from the Google Book Search index.



For users like Dave with a personal site where they'd like to include a book in their discussion of a topic, we offer a simple Preview Wizard. With a few clicks and customizations, you can easily add book previews right to your own site. Options include an embedded or popup book viewer, or buttons linking to Google Book Search. Fill out the Preview Wizard's fields and then simply paste the HTML code onto your page.

If you are more familiar with website design (or have a helpful webmaster), we also offer a full Developer Guide, which includes customizable options for advanced users.

Folks trying out the API can ask questions and look for tips from other users at our Google Book Search APIs Help Forum.

While not an API, we also continue to offer a function to clip and share content from public domain content in Google Book Search on your site or blog. For public domain content, simply click the () icon, highlight a section of text, and copy and paste that HTML snippet into your site.

It should look something like this:

The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom by Wilbur Henry Siebert, Albert Bushnell Hart

We're excited to see how you use these features. Read the full post 0 comments

From the Mailbag: Blending books when you want them

Thursday, March 05, 2009 at 10:54 AM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Book Search Online Team

Welcome to another edition of "From the Mailbag," where we respond to emails from Google Book Search users. This week's message comes from Michael, who writes:

I love Google Books. [But] when I'm looking for a book and I do a Google search on it (a regular Google search, not specifically in Books), why doesn't Google "find itself"? Is it because it's in Beta? I'd rather have it pop up at the top of a Google Search as opposed to having to make a "special" search at books.google.com.

Thanks for the insightful question, Michael. Deciding which type of content to show in results for a specific search term is an interesting and challenging question. When you search for a term and a book is the best source of information, we want you to be able to find it easily.

Say, for example, you type "Shakespeare" in to Google. Are you looking for biographical details about the playwright, a picture of the man, videos of performances of his works, or to read and buy a copy of one of his works? This is the kind of challenge in ranking search results that is exciting for our teams to tackle.

When searching on our homepage, http://books.google.com, you are directly searching the text of over 7 million books. For searches on Google.com, we will blend books into search results when we think it fits the query. In fact, this blending of results in Google.com is the largest driver of book views and traffic.



If you search for a specific book on Google.com, such as The War of the Worlds, the cover of the book and a link to a Book Search result appears in the top results. Similarly, if you search Google.com for a specific author, such as Octavia Butler or Geoffrey Chaucer we'll provide you with a cluster of their books in your results. Book results also come up for general search terms when they are the best fit, such as "organizing your sock drawer."



On a separate note, the Google Scholar team also blends book results into their scholarly material search results. Google Scholar is a search tool for finding academic literature which is available and indexed online. Some of this content is found on Google Book Search, so for certain queries like "Albert Einstein," Google Scholar will show book results too.

We are continually working on better ways to surface relevant book results on your searches, along with new functionalities when viewing books on Google Book Search. Read the full post 0 comments

From the Mailbag: Report scanning errors in a cinch

Tuesday, February 19, 2008 at 9:47 AM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Book Search Support Team

Welcome to another edition of "From the Mailbag," where we respond to emails from Google Book Search users. This week's message comes from Albert F., who writes:

"I can't find a way to report a scanned book in the Google repository that has page corruption (specifically a hand where text should appear). It would be nice to have some kind of link in the browser that specifically says something like Report a problem with this book rather than the generic 'general feedback' link."

Albert, it seems that you share an ESP-like connection with Google engineers, because we've been working on just this feature. You'll now find a link next to all book pages on Google Book Search which allows you to submit an unreadable page to our team for review. There's no need to fill anything out – when you click this link, we'll detect the issue with the page you're looking at and get on the case. Here's where you'll find the link:


So it's not exactly "Report a problem with this book," but hey, we're pretty close! We're always working to make sure that we're showing accurate scans for the books in our index, and this is an important step towards that goal. Don't worry, though – if you want to send us feedback as before, you can still do so from this page. Read the full post 0 comments

From the mail bag: Where can I get this book?

Thursday, February 07, 2008 at 6:03 PM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Book Search Support Team

It’s time for another post “From the mail bag,” where we publish an email from one of our users and tackle it head-on. Here's a message from Bob in Arlington, Texas, who’s new to Google Book Search:

“I have found a book that I am interested in. It has been scanned. I have added it to My Library, but I cannot find out how to access or buy it. How can I do that?”

So you've discovered a great book, and after getting to know it a little bit, you've added it to your personal online collection. You feel ready to take the next step, but how do you seal the deal?

Take a look at the right hand column of the Google Book Search interface, where you'll see the ‘Buy this book’ heading:



We’ve partnered with a whole lot of publishers (over 10,000) to bring you previews of their books on Google Book Search. If the book you’ve found was submitted by one of these publishers, you'll often find that the first link takes you directly to their website. In this case, you could follow the first link to purchase the book directly from its publisher, Routledge.

You'll also find links that take you to various online bookstores. You’ll see different links depending on where you're located, since we try to make sure you get geographically relevant sites.

Finally, you’ll see a link to ‘Find this book in a library.’ We work with major union catalogs like WorldCat so we can show you which libraries closest to you have your book available.

That's not all, though -- when a book is no longer under copyright where you live, we work to ensure that you have the option to download a PDF copy, which you can print and read at your own pace.

And with that, we've finished our tour of ways you can get a print copy of an intriguing book. We hope it helps those of you who've chanced to run into a book a few times to "make the connection"... Read the full post 0 comments

From the (personal) mail bag: Books on film

Monday, February 12, 2007 at 10:13 AM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Book Search Support Team

My friend Neal is a production assistant, and recently he asked me if I knew of any good books about film production or screenwriting he could check out on Google Book Search. I told him that I would answer via a blog post, so others might discover a new book or two as well.

Hey Neal,

Like I said, I’m going to answer your question about screenwriting and film production books on Google Book Search through this blog post. I thought it might be useful to start us off in the early days of cinema before bringing us up to the present day.

The Lumière brothers are widely credited with advancing the first cinematic technology, but there’s a lot of other interesting film devices that developed in the 19th century. For example, take the zoopraxiscope, which was pioneered by Eadweard Muybridge. It’s a precursor to modern cinematic technology that was described as “a magic lantern run mad.” Even further, the author of this description said he was “afraid that, had Muybridge exhibited his ‘Zoopraxiscope’ thirty years earlier, he would have been burnt for a wizard.”

But you asked about screenwriting and film production. If you’re looking for an overview of these subjects, I’d suggest taking a look at Screenwriting in the 21st Century and Film Production Management. You’ll be able to find a lot more titles similar to these by taking a look at the ‘Related books’ section, which you’ll find on the ‘About this book page for each title.

To take your film production to the next level, have a look at Film Production Theory, which will place your work in the context of European critical theory — save this one for a rainy day.

As for refining your screenwriting skills, why not learn from a master? I would check out the screenplay for Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll see on the page how you don’t need much dialogue to produce a powerful effect. Here’s a book called Aristotle in Hollywood, which you might enjoy if Greeks are more your thing. If you want a more philosophical view of screenwriting, have a look at The Way of the Screenwriter, which was published in 2006, so the title could very well be a Ghost Dog reference. For a historical perspective, there are also some interesting older titles like Writing for the Photoplay (1919) and Photoplay Scenarios: How to Write and Sell Them (1915) which you can read in full.

Well, I hope that you’ve found this useful. Definitely take a look at the ‘Related books’ to find more useful books in this vein. Thanks, Neal, for asking about these books, and enjoy your experience with Google Book Search.

Dan

Read the full post 0 comments

From the mail bag: Stop thief!

Tuesday, January 09, 2007 at 5:53 PM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Google Book Search Support Team

We’re always excited to hear about interesting uses of Google Book Search, and in this edition of “from the mail bag,” we check in with Jamie from China, who writes:

I typically receive GRE/SAT/TOEFL test preparation manuscripts from local authors. Passages by the native Chinese speaker often sound strikingly natural in English. To be sure, I run a quick search for the complete phrase in Google Book Search. When exact hits come back with Barron's, Princeton Review, or Kaplan, we know to contact our author and revise accordingly.

Although you may have already read about this phenomenon in a well-publicized Slate article from a couple of months back, it may come as news to some folks. In short, Jamie and others are taking advantage of the fact that you can search for any sentence across our wide index of books to see how it’s been used in the past. If, as in Jamie’s case, a piece of work sounds too good to be true, why not plug it in to Google Book Search to see if the author was feeling particularly “inspired” by some other muse?

Paul Collins, the Slate journalist, points out that literary plagiarism has, in fact, a fairly distinguished history. For example, Lawrence Sterne pulled off a clever literary heist at the beginning of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, in which he asks, “Are we forever to be twisting, and untwisting the same rope?” This appeal for literary innovation was itself lifted almost directly from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Just follow the links to see for yourself!

Incidentally, Sterne was quite a literary innovator, and I strongly suggest leafing through Tristram Shandy. It’s such an influential work that you might even be able to find a few phrases that latter-day practitioners of the art of plagiarism have stolen -- artistically, of course. Read the full post 0 comments

From the mail bag: Public domain books and downloads

Thursday, November 09, 2006 at 11:19 AM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Book Search Support Team

It's time for this month's "from the mail bag" post, where we answer your questions about the ins and outs of using Google Book Search. This month, Philipp from Germany asks,

Why can't I download this book and many others on the Google Book Search Scary Stories site? I can’t even see the books in full view from Germany.

Only books in the public domain -- books no longer under copyright -- have the download feature available. For users in the United States, this typically means books published before 1923. For users outside the U.S., we make determinations based on appropriate local laws. Since whether a book is in the public domain can often be a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain. These books (including some of the books on our scary stories page) may be in the public domain, but until we can be sure, we show them as if they are not.

We're working quickly to digitize and index as many books as possible so we can make Google Book Search truly comprehensive and useful. One way to treat digitized books that may be in the public domain would be to exclude them from the index until we were sure. However, our goal is to make the index as useful as possible, and that means including books as soon as we can rather than waiting for a perfect determination of public domain status. So, some books may initially show up in "Snippet View" and then later, be expanded to "Full View."

Meanwhile, if you're interested in limiting your search on Google Book Search to Full View books, you can use the radio button on http://books.google.com.


Once you select a book from the results, you'll see a “Download” button on the right side of the page if the book is out of copyright. Click the button to download a PDF file of the book to your computer.

Once you download the book, you can print it our or read it at your own pace -- without having to be online.

While we face challenges due to the scale of our project, we're working hard to make the public domain verification process faster and more efficient. So when you find a book that you believe “should” be in the public domain and all you can see is basic bibliographic information or a few snippets, it's because we've chosen to make it searchable (we often say, “discoverable”) until we know for certain that it has entered the public domain and can be displayed in full. Read the full post 0 comments

From the mail bag: How can I see more of this book?

Tuesday, September 05, 2006 at 3:56 PM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Book Search Support Team

Suppose you're searching on Google for books about, oh, say, the design of electrical installations. You see links pop up showing book results from Google Book Search. It looks like you've found the perfect book, but you're not quite sure yet. You follow a link and see a page from a book with your search term highlighted. But you're still not sure it's the right book, and you want to see more. What do you do?

That's the question we got from Amutha, who sent us an email asking:

How can I see more pages in the book, A Textbook of Design of Electrical Installations by V.K Jain & Amitabh Bajaj?

For many in-copyright books, such as the one Amutha's interested in, we show a limited preview of pages. In a limited preview, you can browse through a few pages without having to log in by using the navigation arrows at the top right of each book page:


These arrows allow you to page through the available preview pages. If you're browsing a book this way, we won't ask you for any further information.

However, other people, like Joudi, have asked about viewing specific pages:

I attempted to read this page, but I couldn't because you required detailed information. Can you help me?

When we ask you for information, it's because we have a mechanism in place to enforce the limits of the preview. That means that in many cases, we don't show you certain pages unless you're logged in to a Google Account. If you already have an account (like a Gmail or Google Groups account), you're all set -- just plug in your regular login info to continue browsing up to the limit of the preview. If you don't have an account, it's quick and easy to create one, and you'll have better access to the books you find.



But remember, even after you log in, you won't be able to see some pages of the book -- to protect authors and publishers, some portions will remain hidden at all times (it's what we sometimes call the "swiss cheese" effect).

If you've browsed up to the limit and you still want more, you can follow the links to buy the book or borrow it from your local library. Of course, you also have the option of searching specifically for books you can see in full view. Just select the "Full view" radio button on http://books.google.com -- you'll be able to page through the entire text of books that are either out of copyright or displayed in full at the request of the copyright holder. Read the full post 0 comments

From the mail bag: four book views

Wednesday, July 05, 2006 at 4:41 PM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Book Search Support Team

One of the topics we regularly receive questions about is the different ways we display books. For example, João from Portugal asks:

I thought that we could read the whole content of books on Google, but I can only read the Table of Contents and a few other pages of this book, then buy the book afterwards. How can I read the entire book?

Searching around on Book Search, you'll see that we display books in different ways depending on the specific copyright status of each title. Given the status, we range from making the entire text of public domain books available to showing either small snippets or simply bibliographic details about in-copyright books. For books that authors and publishers have submitted to us, you can see a limited preview of the pages.

The four ways you'll see books in Google Book Search

Full View


For books in Full View, you can view the entire book. These include books that we've verified are in the public domain, or those that the publisher or author has decided to make fully browsable. Some examples of materials presented in Full View (in the U.S.) are Charles Sumner's eulogy for Abraham Lincoln from 1865 and a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's stories from 1903.







Limited Preview


For books that fall into this category, you can view a limited number of pages. These books have been submitted through our Partner Program by copyright holders in order to enable you to find and browse (and purchase!) their books. A few examples include Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events series, or the late Octavia Butler's powerful novel Kindred.







Snippet View


Books that may still be in copyright that we don't receive through the Partner Program are displayed in Snippet View. For these books, you can view a few sentences in addition to bibliographic information. For example, you can view mentions of China in the 1937 report, Japan in Jeopardy, or check out references to man-eating sharks in the 1940's title This Amazing Planet.








No Preview Available


For some books -- like dictionaries -- we display only basic information about the books. You're still searching the full text of these books from books.google.com, so you'll be able to figure out if your search term appears anywhere within the book, even if it's not in the title or index. You can find out details about Webster's New World Crossword Puzzle Dictionary or see basic information about this Pocket English-Bengali Dictionary.





Our goal is to provide everyone with a good Book Search experience, while at the same time protecting the copyrights of publishers and authors. Some books may start out with no preview or in Snippet View, and later be shown in Limited Preview or Full View as we partner with the copyright owners or confirm that the book is in fact in the public domain. In the meantime, we'll continue to be conservative in our display of the books in Google Book Search.

We hope this helps clear up some of the confusion -- we want you to get the most out of Book Search. If you have any additional questions about these different book views, send us a note -- we'll be happy to answer them. Read the full post 0 comments

From the Google Book Search mail bag

Thursday, May 18, 2006 at 9:40 AM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Book Search Support Team

As a regular feature on this blog, we'll be addressing questions from our users, including questions about how to get the most out of Book Search.

This week, Pavan asks:

If I want to see only full-view books, how do I do it?

You can limit your search to full-view books right from the Book Search homepage. Simply click the 'Full view books' button and enter your search term as you usually do -- you'll get results limited to full-view titles, including public domain titles and books that publishers have chosen to display in full view.

Whenever you use Book Search, we strive to give you the most relevant books for the search terms you enter -- but sometimes, you're looking for something quite specific. Limiting your search to full-view books is just one of the Advanced Search options we've developed to help you find what you're looking for. Here's a brief tour through some of the others.

• Say you loved Fahrenheit 451 in high school, and you're looking for other novels or short stories by the incomparable Ray Bradbury. Try searching by author.


• Or suppose you're trying to track down Scott Westerfeld's great young-adult horror novel, Midnighters (and its sequel). You can easily search by title.


• Or maybe you're an ardent supporter of small publishers like Small Beer Press, and you want to check out the latest titles. Try limiting your search to a particular publisher.


• Or you're looking for historical perspective on current affairs, and you want to see references to Iran from the years 1500-1900. Try searching by publication date.


• You're sure that you've heard the Google Scholar tagline, "Stand on the shoulders of giants" before? Find out if you're right by searching by exact phrase.

We hope this was helpful. If you have a question you'd like us to answer or ideas for improving Book Search, we encourage you to drop us a line and let us know. Read the full post 0 comments