Offline Google eBooks

"I find it amusing that reading books offline is a new feature." (Krewe Maynard)

If you've used Google eBooks for Android or iPhone, you probably noticed that the mobile apps had a clear advantage over the desktop app: you could download books to your device and read them offline. The same feature is now available in the desktop app, but only if you use Chrome.

Just like the apps for Gmail and Google Docs, Google eBooks requires some advanced features that can only be enabled by installing a Chrome Web Store app. Another shortcoming is that the offline version of Google eBooks can only be accessed by clicking the app icon or by bookmarking its special URL and not by visiting books.google.com.

To be able to read a book offline, you need to mouse over the book and click "Make available offline". Advanced features don't work offline, even if not all of them are disabled. You can't search inside a book, take notes or highlight some text.

Right now, the offline app is pretty flaky and buggy. Sometimes you need to wait a few seconds to load the list of books because the app tries to connect to the server. Some of the time, the books didn't even load. Offline Google eBooks looks like an experimental app, but it's nice that you can still try it and help Google improve it. Hopefully, the app will work in other browsers.

{ Thanks, Venkat. }

Google WebGL Bookcase

Google developed a WebGL app that shows a 3D model of a bookcase with more than 10,000 titles. "We designed a digital bookcase that's an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse," suggests Google.

WebGL Bookcase groups books into 28 categories and lets you choose one of them by clicking the button from the top of the page. The animation is impressive. Unfortunately, after selecting one of the books, the application sends you to Google Books to read it. If you have a mobile phone and an app that reads QR codes, you can open the book on your phone.


This could turn into a very cool app for tablets. A future Google Books app for iPad and Android tablets could help users explore the books that are available and even create a special section for the books already owned by the users.

For now, the app requires a browser that supports WebGL (Chrome, Firefox) and a computer with a compatible graphics card. "We recommend using Google Chrome and a fast computer with a powerful graphics card. Even with new hardware, this interface is experimental and may not work on some machines," informs Google. I tried WebGL Bookcase in the latest Aurora (Firefox 9 Alpha 2) builds and it works pretty well. Unfortunately, the app can't open books in Firefox 7.

New Interface for Google Books

Google Books is the latest Google service with an updated interface that's cleaner and more consistent. Unfortunately, this means there's more white space and less space for books. For example, on a 800x600 resolution almost two thirds of the screen are used for navigation elements. Even if you click the "full screen" button, Google still displays the navigation bar, the search box and the toolbar buttons, while hiding the sidebar and the book's title.




It's clear that the new Google+ interface is not suitable for all Google services and consistency sometimes makes Google's tools less useful. Displaying the navigation bar and the search box takes away valuable space and this is especially noticeable if you use a netbook. The new interface is not flexible or elastic, like Google intended. "The new design will soon allow you to seamlessly transition from one device to another and have a consistent visual experience. We aim to bring you this flexibility without sacrificing style or usefulness," explained Google. It seems that the new design sacrifices usefulness for the sake of consistency.

{ Thanks, Kon Young. }

Google eBooks Integrates with Google Dictionary, Google Translate and Google Search

Google's eBook Reader for the Web added a contextual menu that lets you define, translate and search for a selected word or text. "To select text in a Google eBook within the Web Reader, double-click or highlight it with your mouse and a pop-up menu opens with the following options: Define, Translate, Search Book, Search Google and Search Wikipedia," explains the Google Books blog.


Definitions are obtained from Google Dictionary, while translation is powered by Google Translate. If you click "Search Book", Google shows a list of all the instances in which the selected text appears in the book.




These features aren't available yet in the Google Books apps for Android and iPhone.

Google Books Ngram Viewer

Google used some of the data obtained from 15 million scanned books to build Google Books Ngram Viewer.

"The datasets we're making available today to further humanities research are based on a subset of that corpus, weighing in at 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year. (...) The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years," says Jon Orwant, from the Google Books team.


The nice thing is that the raw data is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution and can be downloaded for free. Maybe Google should use the same license for the Ngram database obtained from indexing the web.

Google eBooks

Google launched a new service that lets you buy and read books online: Google eBooks. Right now, you can only buy books if you are in the US, but you can read 3 million public domain books for free from any location.

Google's goal is to create an online book shelf where you can store books bought from Google eBooks or other services. These books can be read using your computer's browser, using mobile apps for Android and iOS devices or transfered to eReader devices that run Adobe Digital Editions.

"We designed Google eBooks to be open. Many devices are compatible with Google eBooks— everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. With the new Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud. That means you can access your ebooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa — using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage," explains Google.

Unlike Picasa photos, you can't download DRM-free eBooks from Google to read them using other devices that aren't currently supported (Amazon's Kindle is an important example). Google eBooks may seem open, but it's actually closed. For example, you can only read books offline using Google's mobile apps and using eReaders that support Adobe's eBook platform.

Google Editions to Be Released This Month

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google will launch this month Google Editions, the service that will allow users to read copyrighted books from Google Book Search.

The long-delayed venture — Google executives had said they hoped to launch this summer — recently has cleared several technical and legal hurdles, people close to the company say. It is set to debut in the U.S. by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year, said Scott Dougall, a Google product management director. (...)

Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers — including independent bookstores — and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

This will finally answer the question "How can I read an entire book in Google Book Search?". Right now, you can only read books in the public domain and some books from the Partner Program. "Many of the books in Google Books come from authors and publishers who participate in our Partner Program. For these books, our partners decide how much of the book is browsable - anywhere from a few sample pages to the whole book," explains Google. Google's partners will now have an incentive to allow full access to the books: users will actually pay to read the books.

Google Editions Book Store to Be Launched Soon

Wall Street Journal reports that Google will launch a digital book store in late June or July.

"Google says its new service — called Google Editions — will allow users to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service. It will also allow book retailers — even independent shops — to sell Google Editions on their own sites, taking the bulk of the revenue."

According to Google, the service will sell "online access to million of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future."


For now, Google Editions will only allow users to read in-print books, since Google can't yet distribute out-of-print books. Google's hosted electronic book store will have the following tagline: "buy anywhere, read anywhere," but I think Google should change it to: "buy anywhere, read anywhere you have Internet access".

Google Book Search's Irrelevant Suggestions

You probably noticed that Google's search services show different suggestions. For example, when you type "us" in Google Image Search, the first suggestion is "us map". Typing "us" in Google Web Search doesn't return the same suggestion: "us bank" is more popular. It makes sense to restrict the suggestions to queries that are popular in each specialized search engine because they're actually relevant.

Google Book Search seems to be the only Google service that shows irrelevant suggestions. When you type "shak", the top suggestions are "shakira" and "shake weight", even if "shakespeare" would be much more appropriate. Obviously, Google uses suggestions from the web search engine and "Shakira" is a more popular query than "Shakespeare".


"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action." (Hamlet)

Sergey Brin on Google Books Settlement

There's been a lot of talk about the Google Books settlement that would allow Google to provide access to out-of-print books in the US. This would unlock a lot of valuable information and would make it available in the Google Books interface.

New York Times published a thoughtful op-ed piece by Sergey Brin called "A Library to Last Forever", which tries to explain why the settlement is beneficial to everyone.

The vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. (...)

[Some] have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort. But despite a number of important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the requisite resources.

{ via Tom Stocky }

A New Interface for Google Books

Google's book search engine has a new interface that adds many missing features. The sidebar has been moved to the left, you can now embed a book by click on "Link" and selecting the embedding code, there's a new thumbnail view for pages and the table of contents can be accessed as a drop-down.



The search option that restricts the results to a book has been improved: Google sorts the results by relevance and it's easier to navigate betweeen the search results. "Now, for public domain and partner books, we've made it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book by showing you more context around the term, including an image from the part of the page on which it appears. You can click on those images to navigate directly to the pages inside the book," explains Google.

Download Books from Google Book Search

Google Book Search lets you download books, but only if they're in public domain, like Hamlet. All the other books are available as a limited preview or as a snippet view in Google Book Search.

You could download the image corresponding to each page of a book or you could automatize the process using a download manager. Another option is to use Google Book Downloader, a third-party Windows tool that downloads the pages from Google Book Search using several proxies and merges the images in a PDF file. Google Book Downloader will only retrieve the pages that are available online, so you won't be able to download entire books in most cases. The application requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and it's not very clear if it breaks the terms of use for Google Book Search.

Embeddable Google Books

Google made it easy to embed in a site any book available at Google Book Search. You can add a fully-functional widget using this code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://books.google.com/books/previewlib.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
GBS_insertEmbeddedViewer('GkCpLIk7aisC',600,500);
</script>

where you should replace GkCpLIk7aisC with the corresponding book ID, which can be obtained from the URL. Here's the result for "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens:

"As on the Book Search site itself, you can search within the book, zoom in and out on the page, and browse up to 20% of the book," explains Inside Google Book Search. The new widget is already used by online catalogs like WorldCat.org and social book sites like weRead to preview books.

This is just one of the three Google Books APIs that allow programmatic access to more than one million books.

Froogle Integrates with Google Book Search

After updating the listings for electronics, Google Product Search (previously known as Froogle) integrated the data from Google's book search engine. In addition to the list of stores where you can find a certain book, Google shows a summary of the book, the table of contents, references from the web and related books. There's also a link to Google Book Search, where you can preview and search inside the book.


In other book-related news, Panlibus points to Zoomii, a great visualization for Amazon's bookstore where books are placed in virtual shelves. If the products are more tangible, people are more likely to buy them, so Google should show more visual information: images, videos, trend charts, feature comparison etc.

Google Book Search Adds a Social Layer

Book Search is the fourth Google service that integrates with the unified Google profiles. The list of favorite books includes a small widget with information from the Google profile.

If you find someone who has interesting books in his library, you can add him to a list of favorite libraries. Unfortunately, Google doesn't show when there are new books in your favorite libraries and doesn't make it easy to discover libraries that might interest you. Based on the books from your library, Google could recommend other similar books and a list of users with similar tastes. To make the library more personal, people should be able to annotate books and highlight interesting excerpts.


{ via Inside Book Search }

Quantity Over Quality at Google Book Search

Campus Technology has a well-documented article about Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, which suggests that Google's project is more about quantity than quality. For example, The University of California has to deliver 3,000 books a day to Google, according to their agreement. "All of the libraries are talking about that, in the sense of what might be the most interesting materials to scan. But I'll be very frank: There's a real balance point between volume and selection, especially when looking at these numbers. UC is trying to meet the needs of the contract it's signed," says Robin Chandler, former director of data acquisitions for UC's California Digital Library.

And since Google has to scan a lot of books, it needs a scalable scanning technology. "When it first started, the technical challenge was simply building a scanning device that worked. The next technical challenge was being able to run this scanning process at scale. We would have been quite happy to use commercial scanning technologies if they were adequate to scale to this. We only built our own scanning process because that was the way to make this project achievable for Google," says Dan Clancy from Google.

Surprisingly, the scanning process involves humans, as you can see in some books from Google's index (TechCrunch, Google Blogoscoped, George Hernandez, The Genealogue spotted fingers). "If you go into Google [Book Search] and look at any book, you'll be able to see by the number of body parts and fingerprints that [the pages] are being turned manually," suggests Linda Becker, VP at Kirtas, the company that produces the fastest robotic book scanner in the world: APT BookScan 2400. "If you were to go to the Google site, you'd see that one out of every five pages is either missing, or has fingers in it, or is cut off, or is blurry."


Larry Page announced in October 2007 that the book search index is "over a million books". A search for "now" returns 2,190,600 results (1,740,600 available in limited preview and 214,600 fully available for reading and downloading).

The conclusion of the article is optimistic:

When it comes down to it, then, this brave new world of book search probably needs to be understood as Book Search 1.0. And maybe participants should not get so hung up on quality that they obstruct the flow of an astounding amount of information. Right now, say many, the conveyor belt is running and the goal is to manage quantity, knowing that with time the rest of what's important will follow. Certainly, there's little doubt that in five years or so, Book Search as defined by Google will be very different. The lawsuits will have been resolved, the copyright issues sorted out, the standards settled, the technologies more broadly available, the integration more transparent.

New Homepage for Google Book Search

Google Books Search's redesigned homepage invites you to discover books by clicking on a category or the cover of a popular book. "At Book Search, we have a lot of books, but we don't have shelves or sections, which can make casually browsing books in our index difficult," mentions the product's blog. The intimidating search box is placed at the top of the page, leaving space for some examples of books:

* interesting: practical books like "How to be an even better manager", Math books, medical books

* classics: Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Goethe, Francis Bacon, Alexander Pope - all of them are in the public domain and can be downloaded as PDF files

* highly cited in scholar papers: authoritative books like Hegel's "Science of logic", Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan"

* random subject: books from a randomly-selected topic

Google also lists the main subjects for fiction and non-fiction books and some random subjects. It's interesting that Google Book Search defaults to the cover view when you explore the books from a subject and to the list view when you do a normal search.

For ambiguous queries like [logic], you'll be able to restrict the results to an appropriate subject. You can also use the subject: operator to make your search more precise (for example: war subject:"Science fiction"). Google doesn't offer the complete hierarchy of subjects, so a clever autocomplete would be helpful.

An Online Version of Your Library

Google Book Search has an incredibly useful new feature that lets you build a virtual library of your favorite books. You can import the books if you have a list of ISBNs or search them and click on "Add to library".

Your library has a public URL you can share with other people (here's mine) and even a feed. You can also write reviews, rate the books or categorize them using tags. Probably the most important reason you should build the library is because it becomes searchable. Imagine being able to find a scene from one of your books without knowing its title and by typing some keywords that describe the scene. Of course, Google didn't index all the books in the world, so many of your favorite books aren't yet searchable.

Another new feature is the "cover view", a way to only see the book covers and leave out the additional details. To find the author and the title of a book, hover over its cover.


Book summaries also show popular fragments quoted by other books. "Digitized text is useful beyond search, too. It enables us to infer connections between books through shared passages. (...) You can discover connections between books through quotations like this in a feature we call Popular passages," notes the Google blog.

New York Times reports that Google will also add a way to view the full text of some copyrighted books, but I hope this won't end up like Google Video Store. "This fall, Google plans to start charging users for full online access to the digital copies of some books in its database, according to people with knowledge of its plans. Publishers will set the prices for their own books and share the revenue with Google. So far, Google has made only limited excerpts of copyrighted books available to its users." I discovered this new feature in January in a Google page that describes how it works: "With online access, users who discover a book through Google Book Search will be able to pay for immediate access to its full contents. (...) The book will be available to users only through their browser, and only when they've signed in with their personal account. Users cannot save a copy on their computer or copy pages from the book."

The Quality of Google Book Search

Paul Duguid wrote an interesting article about Google Book Search in which he analyzed the quality of the indexed editions and the search results by doing a search for Lawrence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy", a novel from the 18th century. Mr. Duguid noticed that the Harvard edition of the book had many quality problems and some text wasn't scanned properly. Google Book Search doesn't distinguish between the volumes of a book, so it's difficult to realize that the Stanford edition is actually the second volume of the book.

Google may or may not be sucking the air out of other digitization projects, but like Project Gutenberg before, it is certainly sucking better–forgotten versions of classic texts from justified oblivion and presenting them as the first choice to readers. (...) The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also, on the brief evidence given here, a highly problematic one. Relying on the power of its search tools, Google has ignored elemental metadata, such as volume numbers. The quality of its scanning (and so we may presume its searching) is at times completely inadequate. The editions offered (by search or by sale) are, at best, regrettable. Curiously, this suggests to me that it may be Google's technicians, and not librarians, who are the great romanticisers of the book. Google Books takes books as a storehouse of wisdom to be opened up with new tools. They fail to see what librarians know: books can be obtuse, obdurate, even obnoxious things. As a group, they don't submit equally to a standard shelf, a standard scanner, or a standard ontology.

Patrick Leary, the author of the article Googling the Victorians (PDF), has a pragmatical response, as seen on O'Reilly Radar:

Mass digitization is all about trade-offs. All mass digitizing programs compromise textual accuracy and bibliographical meta-data so that they can afford to include many more texts at a reasonable cost in money and time. All texts in mass digitization collections are corrupt to some degree. Everything else being equal, the more limited the number of texts included in a digital collection, the more care can be lavished on each text. Assessing the balance of value involved in this trade-off, I think, is one of the main places where we part company. You conclude, on the basis of your inspection of these two volumes, that the corruption of texts like Tristram Shandy makes Google Books a "highly problematic" way of getting at the meanings of the books it includes. By contrast, while acknowledging how unfortunate are some of the problems you mention, I believe that the sheer scale of the project and the power of its search function together far outweigh these "problematic" elements.

When scanning and indexing millions of books, it's difficult to assess the quality of each edition. Google Book Search's main goal is to let you discover books you can borrow or buy later on. But Google could add an option to rate the quality of each digitized book or build algorithms that detect flaws or differences between editions. So the next time you do a search for Tristram Shandy, all the editions are clustered and the best one comes up first.

The History of Your Book Searches

Google Web History is more useful starting from today because it has support for a new Google service: Book Search. All your queries, all the books you've opened and a list of the pages you've read are available, sorted chronologically. You can also search the books, but only the title is searchable, which is rather weird.

Web History is a service that lets you "view and search across web pages you've visited in the past". The standard version only logs your Google queries and the associated search results you click on, but if you enable web history, Google can track all the pages you visit. This makes your web history persistent (browsers usually keep your history for about 7 days), fully searchable and always available.