
Google Opens Up Its EPUB Archive: Download 1 Million Books for Free - naish
http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-over-million-public-domain.html
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sharpn
When not hacking, I love investigating the marginalia (doodles in the margins)
of medieval Italian, English & Irish manuscripts. Google's book scanning
project is awesome for this. Ten years ago I couldn't have imagined having
uninterrupted access to this stuff, ever.

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nreece

      I love investigating the marginalia (doodles in the margins) 
      of medieval Italian, English & Irish manuscripts.
    

Sounds interesting. Care to share some of your findings, or maybe the
methodology you employ for your research.

~~~
sharpn
My findings would be a bit esoteric for this arena, arcane stuff about when
Italian music scholars started using counterpoint, previously unknown ancient
Irish nature poems by bored medieval monks etc. And I'm only just evolving my
methodology to the google books stuff - it's actually formatted quite badly if
you want to read the pages (scans are bigger than my screen) but is still a
lot quicker than travelling to a university library & trawling through
parchments (when you're allowed).

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zhyder
"In a world where educational opportunities are often disproportionately
allocated, it's exciting to think that today anyone with an Internet
connection can download any of over one million free public domain books"

I've always thought the OLPC should have pursued a cheap e-reader for public
works, rather than a general-purpose $100 ($200 in practice) laptop. You
should be able to make an LCD-based e-reader for $50 [1] already. A $20 device
doesn't seem far out either.

LCDs can also be bistable, so power is only used when the page changes:
<http://www.nemoptic.com/> . (They still won't look as good as EInk's
electrophoretic displays, but the $ savings are non-trivial.)

[1] E.g. datapoint: Coby's portable DVD player with 7" color LCD is $60:
[http://www.amazon.com/Coby-TFDVD7008-7-Inch-Portable-
Player/...](http://www.amazon.com/Coby-TFDVD7008-7-Inch-Portable-
Player/dp/B001PRKKB6/ref=sr_1_3)

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anurag
Though epub is nice, scanned PDFs might still be the only feasible option
given the current limitations of Google's OCR tech illustrated here:
[http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/08/googles-one-million-
eb...](http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/08/googles-one-million-ebooks-of-
crap.html)

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icey
The data nerd in me went straight looking for where I could download a file
that had a million books in it... I guess they expect us to just get them one-
by-one, eh?

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zzzmarcus
Stanza is a great, free, iPhone app for reading EPUB books. Right now you have
to open the EPUB file with the desktop version of Stanza then download it from
the same wireless network on your iPhone.

I imagine in the near future you'll be able to search Google Books from
directly within Stanza (like you can with several other sites). In fact, the
only reason I can think of that you wouldn't be able to do so would be if
Amazon were to nix it seeing as how they own Lexcycle now.

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tokenadult
That format will be a useful addition to the .PDF format already available for
full-access Google Books. Many mobile book-reading devices are adopting the
EPUB format.

<http://www.web-books.com/Publishing/epub.htm>

I use public-domain mathematics textbooks--including classics like Chrystal's
book on algebra--to prepare lecture notes for the supplemental math classes I
teach. The Google Books are a great resource.

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cakeface
If you want a nice epub reader I use <http://bookworm.oreilly.com/>.

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abdelazer
Yeah, we need to ask Google to whitelist Bookworm so that it can do a remote
add-from-URL (described in [http://labs.oreilly.com/2009/07/new-features-and-
bug-fixes-f...](http://labs.oreilly.com/2009/07/new-features-and-bug-fixes-
for-bookworm.html)). Right now they're blocking it (just like if you tried
wget)...

~~~
cakeface
Yeah, I tried to make a bookmarklet for "Add to Bookworm" and ran into that
problem.

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nalbyuites
Maybe they should join hands with Project Gutenberg now and both parties can
save substantial duplication of effort.

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pavs
Why is President Barrack Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope" available for
free (not download but you can read the whole book)? Is it under public
domain?

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tokenadult
Possessors of copyright can waive certain rights if they so choose.

~~~
pavs
Nice. Even though I am avid book collector, I have been finding myself reading
more books on my computer (mostly PDF) over paperback books. I hope this
catches on and more authors make their books available for everyone to read.

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vdoma
What's interesting is that not all "full view" books are available for
download. I wish there were a filter for just downloadable books.

~~~
tokenadult
_What's interesting is that not all "full view" books are available for
download._

Are most of the examples you have seen been books published recently enough to
still be copyrighted? That has been my experience, in the subjects I have
searched. A sufficiently old book (one definitely in the public domain) seems
to have had a .PDF available for full-text download for a while, and now the
new .EPUB format too.

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fno
Now if only they'd make it truly free, provide an easy download option (also
the possibility to get the whole archive) and use the crowd to improve the
quality of the text.

I wonder if re-hosting is allowed, then someone could start a plain archive
where people can upload the files.

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Engine-uity
Free is the key to a successful online company. Google, Facebook, Myspace and
Youtube are the top web giants that prove this. When giving something away for
free that consumers demand equals traffic. High traffic increases the value of
ad space on a site. Google understands this very well and this why they have
never attempted to sell any software or features they develope. I'm sure
google spend a lot of time and money creating and perfect their free software
that programers sell for hundreds of dollars. The internet is the only place
were one can profit from giving away their product free. This is why old
business models and rules do not apply to Online companies.

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technomancy
I'd like to hope that this will light a fire under Amazon to get the Kindle to
support epub, but I know that's wishful thinking. =\

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mlLK
to cut to the chase, <http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/>

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Ixiaus
So very awesome...

