MetaFilter posts tagged with GoogleBooks

The Art of Google Books

fake — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:13:46 -0800

Here's a stunning gallery of failures and book oddities in Google Books. You can see camera-sensor moire, content detection algorithm failures, condom-covered fingers, failed dewarping, "dewarped" images, failed dithering, pages blurred by turning, and the scanning environment itself, with binder clips to hold book covers and checked rules for absolute scale. My personal favorite: A shot showing the Google page-turning mechanism (employed when they're not using a guillotine and ADF/sheet-feeder). A project by Kristina Wilson.

Opting out rejected, Opting in suggested

Toekneesan — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:58:36 -0800

Only weeks after Judge Denny Chin extended the filing deadline, and presumably a final decision, and reflecting the Department of Justice’s own opinion, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the landmark class-action lawsuit settlement between the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google. And offers some advice for a revised resubmission.

Spin Magazine's early days: putting the Gucci in Guccione

porn in the woods — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:03:09 -0800

Founded in 1985, the first year of Spin Magazine spilled ink on all sorts of great American fringe music. Swans, Sonic Youth, Jandek, Glenn Branca, Hüsker Dü, and Squirrel Bait. The magazine's entire run is available on Google Books. The first year also featured writings from Byron Coley on The Minutemen - article, review of 3-Way Tie (For Last). Andrea 'Enthal post-D.Boon Minutemen tribute. Also worth your time: Henry Rollins on 7-11s, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, the Velvet Underground and The Stooges, and a Black Flag tour diary. Also, don't miss Richard Meltzer's Rock Memories.

The Dispossessed

Artw — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:54:04 -0800

"I am not going to rehearse any arguments pro and anti the “Google settlement.” You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can’t. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle." - Ursula Le Guin resigns from the Authors Guild over the Google Book deal. (Previously)

After I got my post all done, Metafilter says it wants a title!

klangklangston — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:51:10 -0800

The Life and Times of Major Jack Downing of Downingville, away down east in the state of Maine, written by himself. Seba Smith is oft-cited as America's first professional humorist, with his Jack Downing stories being published in 1833, two years before the first anthology of Southern humor appeared. Downing became an archetype almost immediately, representing the humor of rural Yankee life in letters. While Downing made Smith famous, Smith was plagiarized widely by Charles Augustus Davis—whose Letters of J. Downing, Major, Downingville Militia were more widely known than the original. He was also plagiarized less directly by the Canadian author Judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton, whose "Sam Slick" became the default term for Northeasterners in the popular press.

LIFE is Good

Knappster — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:49:41 -0800

Already hosting the LIFE Photo Archive (previously), Google today announces that it has "partnered with Life Inc. to digitize LIFE Magazine's entire run as a weekly: over 1,860 issues, covering the years from 1936 to 1972."

Google Book Downloader

manny_calavera — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:22:14 -0800

Convert "Full View" books in Google Books to PDF . Download. Instructions (via )

“We believe this is a revolution...Content retrieval is now centralized and production is decentralized.”

voltairemodern — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:29:36 -0800

Google makes public domain books available for instant custom printing. Show up anywhere that has one of the book printing machines. Select one of the millions of public domain titles in Google Books digital library. Pay around the price of a mass market paperback. The machine then prints a copy of your desired book* in a few minutes, as demonstrated in this lovingly narrated video. Yes, the machines have been available for a while. (Previously on the blue.) What hasn't been available until now is the Google Books digital library. How exactly Google's support will affect the spread of these book printing machines remains to be seen, but it probably won't hurt their sales. *Say the 1766 edition of Sam Johnson's Dictionary. Or one of James Maxwell's books, like Matter and Motion. Or the original Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. What I'm trying to say is you have some good options.

The Bat Boy Archives

Knappster — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:26:24 -0800

In keeping with its mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Google Books presents every issue of Weekly World News from 1981 to 2007. previously via

Simple print on demand for Google Books and Internet Archive

stbalbach — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 07:18:07 -0800

Public Domain Books Reprints Service is "an experimental non-commercial project to re-print public domain books". It's the first service I have seen that allows simple affordable one-off point and click facsimile paperback replication of any book at Google Books or Internet Archive (millions of books). Curious how it works? Each book includes the technical details (Perl+Ghostscript+DJVU+XLST+etc..). The "experiment" has been running since November and is created by Yakov Shafranovich, a Russian Jewish immigrant in Baltimore of many talents.

Google Books new features

stbalbach — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 09:23:13 -0800

Google Books has an interesting new feature called "Popular Passages" which shows how many future books have quoted passages from the present book - it's billed as a way to follow literary memes but would be equally helpful in sleuthing for old literary crimes. They've also added "Share and Enjoy" for clipping quotes from public domain books into a blog or notebook.