Google Library

Sci-Fi author and blog­ger Cory Doc­torow has writ­ten an excel­lent arti­cle at Boing­Bo­ing on why Google Book Search is one of the great­est things to ever hap­pen to the inter­net. Typ­i­cal of his writ­ing, it’s well worth the read and he demon­strates, at least in this case, how Google’s build­ing of the new Library of Alexan­dria is good for all of us, even writ­ers and pub­lish­ers. If you haven’t tried using the Google Library fea­ture yet, you should check it out. I have been amazed at just how large of a col­lec­tion they are serv­ing up.(I had begun a post on Google’s Book Search for media week, but nev­er got to post­ing it since last week was also insane­ly-busy-at-work week. Doc­torow makes a bet­ter argu­ment than I ever could, anyway.)

If you haven’t tried using the Google Library fea­ture yet, you should check it out. I have been amazed at just how large of a col­lec­tion they are serv­ing up. Accord­ing to Wired, this doesn’ t yet include the dis­put­ed works. I’ve been able to find some very obscure engi­neer­ing texts as well, but just typ­ing in the name of the book and searching.

Exam­ples

So far, this fea­ture is not unlike the “Look Inside The Book” fea­ture at Ama­zon. How­ev­er, hav­ing the world’s texts in search­able for­mat has the poten­tial for enour­mous change in research. Of course, it will take some­one like Google to sort out all the infor­ma­tion and actu­al­ly find some­thing relevant.

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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