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.
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).
"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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
