Google to allow free downloads of public domain books

This sort of thing is powerful. People just need access to it and knowledge of it.

Google Inc. on Wednesday plans to begin letting consumers download and print free of charge classic novels and many other, more obscure books that are in the public domain. Using Google's Book Search service, Web surfers hunting titles like Dante's ''Inferno'' and Aesop's ''Fables'' will be able to download PDF files of the books for later reading, to run keyword searches or to print them on paper. Up to now, the service only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online.

Google's Book Search service is the product of its Books Library Project, which is digitizing books from major libraries around the world in order to make them searchable online. Its partners include the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, the University of California and the New York Public Library. Google is also conducting a pilot project with the Library of Congress.

For kicks, I looked up "eve mark twain" at Google Book Search [books.google.com] and I did find a full copy of Eve's Diary: Translated from the Original Ms., a short story by Mark Twain. I was able to download a PDF copy of a 1906 copy of the book illustrated by Lester Ralph, published in New York by Harper & Brothers Publishers, and scanned from the Harvard University Library.

• I like how they scanned everything from the front cover to the back.
• There were a few bad scans, especially on the pages with just illustrations.
• The website has the page numbering right, but the PDF I downloaded has the page numbering off by one. Hence if I view the document in Acrobat in "facing" page, the odd pages are on the left hand side instead of the right hand side. This is more annoying than usual because this is a book where each odd page has text matched with an illustration on the even numbered page.

I've checked several other books (like Aesop's Fables and Plato's Republic) and their PDFs both had the odd/even problem.

It's funny but if you look you can see scans of the fingers of some of the scanners!

http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC02133295&id=EtkMAAAAIAAJ&pg=PT6&dq=Inazo+Nitobe

Of course free texts are also online at Gutenburg.net, but text typed in is different from scans of original books.

Now if only Google could archive public domain music and video too!

Page Modified: (Auto noted: 2010-02-18 19:27:43Z)