Google Book Search Blog

Emily Dickinson, in her own words and in translation

2009-12-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

Posted by Agustina Dates, Google Books Online Team

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf poses a question that's had a major impact on discussions of writing and gender over the past and current century: Does writing have a "gender"? Does one’s gender leave a trace in words? Could you tell the gender of a writer just by reading what they've written?

Emily Dickinson was born on this day in the year 1860. And while in most of Dickinson's poems it's very obvious to me that they came from the pen of a woman, in others she seems to make her gender imperceptible.

My first introduction to Emily Dickinson was when reading her work in Spanish, and the translator for the book was another woman: the great Argentinean writer Silvina Ocampo. Here things become more complicated... how do we translate? And if writing has a gender, does a translation have it too? What is the task of a translator? Grammar has its own agenda and changes according to the language, so the traces of gender that appear in the original version of a poem may disappear in its translation. At other times, I've read translations that have unearthed traces of gender that were not evident in the original version.

Google Books has scanned books in over 100 languages, and you can search for titles in a specific language by selecting it on our advanced search options. If you speak a language other than English, why don’t you give it a try and look for versions of your favorite books in different languages? You will see it’s a totally different experience!

List of all magazines now available in Google Books

2009-11-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

Posted by Jeffrey Peng, Software Engineer, Google Books

I'm a software engineer on Google Books. One of my main projects is adding magazine content and features to the site. In September we were excited to announce the availability of over 1,860 issues of the iconic LIFE magazine on Google Books. One of the feature requests that I got from friends and family was to add a way to browse all the magazines available. Someone even created a Facebook group called Get Google Magazine Search to provide a list of indexed titles. The group has 45 members and growing, so before it reached millions of members and there were protests in front of my house, I decided that I better act fast. I'm happy to announce that last week I coded up a page on Google Books that lets you browse the available magazine titles. You can view the page here.

I can't promise that I can respond to every Internet protest with a feature addition, but you're always invited to send us feedback here. Rest assured that we're working hard to make the magazine browse, search, and reading experience better each month. Happy reading!

Announcing the winners for the 10 Days in Google Books contest - Part III

2009-10-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Books

Following our first announcement this week, here is the third and final set of winning entries for the 10 Days in Google Books contest. As a reminder, to enter the contest users had to submit a short essay describing what the experience of reading will be like in 100 years.

"Out jogging, Jim spied a news stand, its spire bright red. Looking at it, his ocular implant scrolled headlines about the stand. Seeing one that caught his fancy, a quick motion towards the stand debited his account, and brought the story scrolling over his vision as he continued."

Alexander Hollins, Phoenix, AZ

"Well the problem with reading in the year 2109 is we will at that point in time just start creating paper once again, and then its about another 1000+ years till we invent the press again. What am I talking about? 21 Dec 2012! EVERYONE RUN!"

Lowell Wann, Albuquerque, NM

"One innovation of the future will be real time novelists who craft their stories online as readers interact with the writer and each other, commenting, questioning, and pleading for their favorite characters to achieve deserved greatness or avoid gruesome death."

Jonah Hurwitz, Coral Springs, FL

"Now available in attractive spex, signet ring, wristband, or pendant! Our full-on interactive holographic projection readers connect you to a world of information. News from around the world, classic novels, instant info on any topic, presented in your personalized reading style: language, video, pictograms or symbols. No wireless fee!"

Cheryl Kuchman, Sacramento, CA

"Ah, but to have a book read to you. That will be one of the great advances. Imagine a mechanism which takes a sample of a voice, perhaps from your own memory, and extrapolates a narator's voice from the sample. Choose Grandpa or Winston Churchill to read to you."

Alan S. Gardner, Milo, IA

"Libraries will become time travel portals, and readers will become adventurers, taking a trip to the time period during which the book was written. Immersion into the time period will allow readers to have a more connected experience, and to better grasp the context wherein the book was created."

Shaina Dyson, Taylorsville, NC

"A grown man shrieks in horror! Frightened children cry throughout the museum as their teacher is carted off by paramedics. It was the first papercut this town has seen in decades. Horrible to think how just a century ago, children everywhere were being sliced daily in the pursuit of knowledge."

Kristopher Blake, Norristown, PA

"Touch the bump behind my ear, images of words readily appear. Favorite books to my delight, all within my line of sight. I am traveling today, so I command, "Autosay"! The Literary visions fade, replaced by voice narration (as I bade). Reading, a century changed, unlocked using our brilliant brain!"

Lisandra Sletton, Phoenix, AZ

"For children, the pastime of reading is challenged by other forms of communication and entertainment. In 100 years, traditional reading material (e.g., novels, etc) will be incorporated into multi-media experiences like video games allowing for both classics and new literary works to compete using the latest pop culture preferences."

Jade Harris, New York, NY

"In 100 years reading will be free. There will be no banned books and people of all ages will have access to the vast choices available. Currently taboo books will be discussed openly, and without hatred, amongst the literate."

Brittani Dayton, Mason, OH

Announcing the winners for the 10 Days in Google Books contest - Part II

2009-10-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Books

Following our first announcement this week, here is the second set of winning entries for the 10 Days in Google Books contest. As a reminder, to enter the contest users had to submit a short essay describing what the experience of reading will be like in 100 years.

"It's Earth Memorial Day. Under the Martian sunset's romantic glow, Janet removes her shirt. "What's on your back?" her boyfriend Carl asks. "Part of a book. Did you know books once were printed on murdered biomatter? Isn't that awful? I temptatooed myself in memory of the trees..." "Um," says Carl."

Rachel Sealfon, Cambridge, MA

"Although I've been dead for 35 years, in 2109 my great-great-grandson and I read stories together through our telepresence system. He wrinkles his nose when I bring up a favorite story from my boyhood, leading me to chastise him, "don't judge an ebook by its icon."

Len Wanger, Chicago, IL

"We almost returned to paper, when the oil ran short and dear. The technologists saved us again, folks said they wouldn't, but their eink, memristors and led lamps take less power than their solar cells and thermal engines make. We don't read by candlelight. But we almost did."

Kim Reece, Duarte, CA

"I placed my book on the nightstand next to me and turned off the light. Then in a soft voice, my book picked up where it had left off earlier in the evening. Bookmark it please, I asked the book, and it hummed in quiet, literate, satisfaction."

Michael Gillespie, Charleston, SC

"I pause, run my thumb across the pages and smell the paper. Tonight a classic. Finding it on the shelf, I gently tap my book to its spine. Pages dance and the cover transforms, firmware upgraded so embossing works nicely. Rewrite complete. Config loaded, coffee brewed. Call me old fashioned."

Gavin Cheng, Silppery Rock, PA

"7/27/2109 - Dear Diary, "Someone" swiped my reading glasses today and I had to use the PUBLIC glasses at the libary. Disgusting! The ancient things didn't even accept retinal commands so I had to use the 'page' button. My brother is SO dead!"

Alan Hald, Adams, NE

"Even my great-great-grandchildren will still need paper books to read, because somehow 'Goodnight Moon' is not the same unless the child can take it to bed and slowly love the book to death. Every child who has this experience will never stop loving physical books as mementos of childhood."

David Smedberg, Washington DC

"She was late for class, stuffing books into her bag: biology, chemistry, the complete works of Shakespeare, the English dictionary, the every language everywhere dictionary, the Galactic Encyclopedia. As she strode out the door, ping! A newly discovered chemical element had been added to her chemistry book."

Sonja Harpstead, New York, NY

"Reading (PA city, Monopoly railroad, ESL) will (intention, testament, onomastics) no (negative, nitrous oxide, kana) longer (Dan Fogelberg, unrequited love, anatomy) be (degree, copula, beryllium) linear (y = mx + b, Cretan script, asteroid detection)!"

Sandy Lawrence, Delanson, NY

"Power: ON Resume: The Great Gatsby page 17 Activate reader theme: Classical 20th Century--Gilded Age. Music: ON Contextualizer: ON [..her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk]. User-initiated Query: velvet dusk. Accessing Wikipedia: Dusk "Dusk is the beginning of darkness in the evening." End query. Resume reading."

Gabriel Loupe, Boston, MA

Announcing the winners for the 10 Days in Google Books contest!

2009-10-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Books

In his 1901 book Anticipations, H.G. Wells predicted how the world would develop in the 20th century. Here with a different set of predictions are the winners from the 10 Days in Google Books contest we held this summer.

To enter the contest, users had to submit a short essay describing what the experience of reading will be like in 100 years. After combing through some tens of thousands of submissions, we're excited to present the winners, who will each receive a Sony Reader.

The winning entries range from science fiction to drama, from heartfelt to humorous, and demonstrate the wide range of thought and uniquely personal connection that people have with books and reading. The entries were selected based on a number of creative factors including originality and expression of the theme. (Please note, the opinions expressed in these essays in no way represent the view of Google or those of us working on the Google Books team.)

With that said, congratulations to our first 10 winners. Stay tuned this week for the other winning entries!

"A completely immersive experience. Seeing, feeling, smelling. I run, I jump, I fall. My heart races as I experience it. And then, as I get closer... "Stop reading" I hear. "Come do your chores." I'll have to land tomorrow."

Richard Stewart, Famington, UT

"Books will still exist for those who have not chosen The Implant. The rest of us will mentally turn on the Neural Implant Knowledge Stream anytime we like and let it run subconsciously. We'll control the "volume" mentally, allowing us to tune in -or out- the things around us."

George Beecher, Lawrenceville, GA

"When you walk by a book in the bookstore or your home library, the books, if determined to be of interest to you, will call out your name and given a short description of themselves to you."

Jacob P. Silvia, Houston, TX

"In twenty-one-o-nine, they'll make a new vine. It will flex and twist and sway, and words will form in such a way. When news is bad, and life is hard, you'll read it from your luscious yard. It's hard to feel any despair, when standing in the garden air."

Richard Call, Sonora, CA

"Books will come equipped with music players specially designed to play complementary music to the books as they are being read. Music will change as different events take place, much like the soundtrack to a movie."

Shaina Dyson, Taylorsville, NC

"In 100 years, most modern literature will be written by apes. Through the haphazardly combined efforts of global warming and cosmetic testing gone horribly wrong, apes will develop the skills to read and write. Many critics will be bludgeoned to death for bad reviews by tortured ape artists."

Erik Good, San Jose, CA

"In 100 years, reading will still be a popular way to wind down from a hard day. Stories will be read to sleepy children before being tucked in. The way we access books might change, but those who love reading will continue to make it a part of daily life."

Jennifer Garcia, Hartford, CT

"Reading a book will be prescribed as a relaxing activity for folks with a variety of health concerns. There will emerge a variety of "reading spas" where people can go to read books in calming environs."

Adam Ness, Long Beach, CA

"My daughter will celebrate her 100th birthday in the year 2109. Aging vision will not deny her the pleasure of reading a book; rather, the whole library of human civilization will be accessible and portable. Textual appearances will adapt. Pages will flood with summoned content: words, images, and sounds interacting."

Andy Unrein, Scottsbluff, NE

"100 years from now reading will still inspire, inform, and entertain. Students will have not only the local library but the entire world's library at their fingertips. Information abundance will be organized so as to be useful and relevant, leading to informed decision making."

Nadine DeMartino, Anaheim, CA

LIFE magazine now available on Google Books

2009-09-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

When I was a kid I used to enjoy thumbing through a collection of older magazines that my grandfather had at his house. I remember flipping through the pages and feeling as though I was peeking through a window into life from decades past. Unfortunately, we lost my grandfather's magazines some time ago, and we've never quite managed to recreate his collection. But I know that if we could, those magazines would be just as fascinating today as they were years ago, which is why we've been partnering with publishers to digitize magazines and bring them online.

I'm excited to announce that starting today, visitors to Google Books will be able to search and browse even more magazines on Google Books. We've 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. Most of us are familiar with the term "American Century," but chances are few of us have been able to read Henry Luce's defining editorial in its original context, a 1941 issue of LIFE. You'll be able to find and read Leonard McCombe’s iconic cover and photo essay on a Texas Cowboy and Richard Meryman's famous last interview with Marilyn Monroe. You can find a 1968 cover story on Georgia O'Keeffe (which you may want to read if you're visiting the Whitney Museum anytime soon).

You'll even find Alfred Eisenstadt's famous photo of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on VJ Day in 1945.

This is part of a broader effort across Google to help bring offline content online and allow people to find it with a simple Google web search. In addition to viewing these and other extraordinary photographs printed in the original issues of LIFE, you can also search and browse millions of individual photos produced by LIFE on Google Image Search. The LIFE photography collection on Google Image Search includes more than 10 million images, 97 percent of which were never published in the magazine. Both are blended into Google Web Search, so when you do a search from google.com, you're also searching millions of images and thousand of magazine issues from LIFE.

To start your journey through history, hop on over to Google Books where you can browse through all the available issues of LIFE. Be sure to try out our recently launched Thumbnail View to see the layout of all the pages in the magazine.

You can filter your search to magazine content by choosing "Magazines" for the content type on the advanced search panel on Google Books.

You can also use the magazines filter in the Search Options Panel in web search.

Discover Books and Magazines using Search Options

2009-09-18T09:55:00.000-07:00

Posted by Matthew Gray, Grant Dasher, and Garrett Rooney, Google Books Software Engineers

Earlier this year, we introduced the Search Options panel in web search, making it easier to perform queries that limit results to a particular type of content- such as videos, forums, and reviews. We are now making it even easier to find books and magazines by making all of the content on Google Books searchable using the Search Options panel.

This will provide easier access to books and magazines by letting you slice and dice your results with certain characteristics. For example, you can now search for only books or magazines or for only content that you can preview in Google Books.

Try this yourself when you search the web using Google by clicking "Show options..." and selecting "Books".

Please note that this is currently only available in the United States, but we look forward to making this available elsewhere in the future.

Books Digitized by Google Available via the Espresso Book Machine

2009-09-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

I'm a sucker for a cool piece of technology. The Espresso Book Machine, which can print a book in minutes before your eyes, fits the bill. If sentient robots ever succeed in taking over the world, this is how they will print their books.

We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. We recently made available over a million free public domain books for viewing and download from our web site. Reading digital books can be an enjoyable experience, but we realize that there are times when readers want a physical copy of a book. To that end, I'm excited to announce that we're partnering with On Demand Books to allow readers to purchase public domain books digitized by Google from any Espresso Book Machine at bookstores and libraries around the world.

Here's some video footage of the Espresso machine in action:

We believe in an open ecosystem where people can access and read books, whether at a computer, on their phone or electronic reader, or from their local library or bookshop. This announcement is yet one more step towards fulfilling that mission: it helps people find and read these books in more ways.

An update on Google Books and privacy

2009-09-03T16:25:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jane Horvath, Global Privacy Counsel
(Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog)

We're excited about the wide range of support that the Google Books settlement has received. Some people have asked how Google's privacy practices apply to Books and the settlement, and, last month, we published an extensive FAQ.

Since last spring, we've had detailed discussions with a number of groups about our privacy practices within Google Books as well as some of our preliminary thoughts about what privacy protections we want to build into services authorized by our settlement agreement. As part of our outreach, we talked to Federal Trade Commission staff to hear their thoughts and answer their questions on privacy and Books. Rather than limit our conversations to the FTC and other specific organizations, though, we wanted to share the results of our exchange with the wider public by releasing a formal Privacy Policy for Google Books, and by highlighting a letter we recently sent to the FTC on Google Books and privacy.

While Google Books has always been covered by the general Privacy Policy for all of Google's services, we understand that the privacy of reading records is especially important to readers and libraries. We know that users want to understand how Google's privacy practices apply to Books today, and what will happen after the settlement. To provide all users with a clear understanding of our practices, and in response to helpful comments about needing to be clearer about the Books product from the FTC and others, we wanted to highlight key provisions of the main Google Privacy Policy in the context of the Google Books service, as well as to describe privacy practices specific to the Google Books service. We've also described some privacy practices for services created by our proposed settlement agreement, which is currently awaiting court approval.

As we noted in our letter to the FTC, because the settlement agreement has not yet been approved by the court, and the services authorized by the agreement have not been built or even designed yet, it's not possible to draft a final privacy policy that covers details of the settlement's anticipated services and features. Our privacy policies are usually based on detailed review of a final product -- and on weeks, months or years of careful work engineering the product itself to protect privacy. In this case, we've planned in advance for the protections that will later be built, and we've described some of those in the Google Books policy. We have also covered several privacy issues in our letter to the FTC on Google Books. You can read more of that exchange on the FTC's website here.

We take our privacy commitments to our users very seriously. It's important to note that like all of our privacy policies, this one is legally enforceable by the FTC, which has helped us clarify our practices and policies through comments and questions.

Download Over a Million Public Domain Books from Google Books in the Open EPUB Format

2009-08-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

Over the years, we've heard a lot from people who've unearthed hidden treasures in Google Books: a crafter who uncovered a forgotten knitting technique, a family historian who discovered her ancestor once traveled the country with a dancing, roller-skating bear. The books they found were out of copyright and in the public domain, which meant they could read the full text and even download a PDF version of the book.

I'm excited to announce that starting today, Google Books will offer free downloads of these and more than one million more public domain books in an additional format, EPUB. By adding support for EPUB downloads, we're hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places. More people are turning to new reading devices to access digital books, and many such phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers have smaller screens that don't readily render image-based PDF versions of the books we've scanned. EPUB is a lightweight text-based digital book format that allows the text to automatically conform (or "reflow") to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices, works you download from Google Books as EPUBs won't be tied to or locked into a particular device. We'll also continue to make available these books in the popular PDF format so you can see images of the pages just as they appear in the printed book.

To get started, just find any public domain book on Google Books and click on the Download button in the toolbar.

Of course, these public domain books weren't born in EPUB format--or even in digital format at all. Let's say you download a free EPUB copy of Treasure Island. You're taking a final step in a long process that takes a physical copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's book and transforms it into something you can download for your iPhone. The process begins with a book that has been preserved by one of our library partners from around the world. Google borrows the book from one of our library partners, much like you can from your local library. Before returning the book in undamaged form, we take photographs of the pages. Those images are then stitched together and processed in order to create a digital version of the classic book. This includes the difficult task of performing Optical Character Recognition on the page image in order to extract a text layer we can transform into HTML, or other text-based file formats like EPUB (if you're interested, you can read more about this process here).

Digitizing books allows us to provide more access to great literature for a wider set of the world's population. Before physical books were invented, thoughts were constrained by both space and time. It was difficult for humans to share their thoughts and feelings with a set of people too far from their physical location. Printed books changed that by allowing authors to record their experiences in a medium that could be shipped around the world. Similarly, the words written down could be preserved through time. The result was an explosion in collaboration and creativity. Via printed books, a 17th century physicist in Great Britain could build on the work of a 16th century Italian scholar.

Of course, it can be difficult and costly to reproduce and transport the information that older physical books contain. Some can't afford these works. Others who might be able to afford to purchase them can't unless they can find a physical copy available for sale or loan. Some important books are so limited in quantity that one must fly around the world to find a copy. Access to other works is only available to those who attend certain universities or belong to certain organizations.

Once we convert atoms from physical books into digital bits, we can begin to change some of that. While atoms remain fairly expensive, digital bits are on a trend where they become ever cheaper to produce, transport, and store. For example, providing every student in a school district with a paper copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet might cost thousands of dollars. Yet if those same students already have cell phones, laptops, or access to the Internet, then they can access a digital copy of Hamlet for just a fraction of the cost. Often times, public domain texts in digital form are more affordable and accessible to the public than their physical parents.

All of this of course assumes that a digital version of the book exists. I love going into work each morning knowing that we're working to convert atoms into bits and that by doing so, we hope to make knowledge more accessible. 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 from Google Books. Who knows. Maybe some kid will read Treasure Island on their phone and be inspired to write their own great novel some day.

Judging a book by its (pretty) cover

2009-08-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

Posted by Guillaume Poncin, Software Engineer

Library books often contain beautiful drawings and illustrations. Unfortunately, their book covers can often be dark and plain, hiding all this wonderful content from unsuspecting eyes. Over time, we've tried a bunch of different approaches for getting better covers, for example, using the book's title page or recreating a simple book cover by featuring the book's title and author. Finally we hit upon an idea that we like -- why not surface the illustrations inside the book to be its front cover?

It all started from an experiment conducted by our product manager, Frances Haugen, a few months ago. Back then, we tried our hand at putting together a few book covers manually. We liked what we saw, and since then we've been refining our algorithms to automatically extract relevant illustrations to use, hence adorning a good fraction of the public domain books we've scanned with new, pretty covers.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Want to see more? One way is to show your search results in 'cover view', which you can do by clicking on the "Cover view" link on the upper right-hand side of the page. For example, see what turns up when you search for plants or Holmes.

We hope this brightens up your search experience on Google Books and helps you discover even more titles on our site.

Sharing Public Domain Books

2009-08-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partnership Development Manager, Europe

When we launched Google Books, one of our goals was to bring the world's lost literature back to life. Many older books which are out of copyright (so-called public domain works) have been languished in the difficult-to-reach corridors of the world's great libraries. If you are a student at Oxford or Harvard, you might have a chance to find and read them. If you live thousands of miles away or are a scholar at a local community college, it may be near impossible to do so.

The Internet offers a fabulous opportunity to begin to address this inequality. We've been partnering with libraries around the globe, including many institutions in Europe such as the Bavarian State Library or the Bodleian Library at Oxford, to bring these books online so that anyone can discover and read them. In addition, we want people to be able to find these books in places other than just on books.google.com. So we're in constant dialog with several prestigious cultural institutions, such as the Spanish National Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, in order to help as many readers as possible around the world search and read public domain books.

We're not only reaching out to libraries, but also to other technology partners. We believe in an open platform for accessing and reading books, and we're always open to discussing opportunities with technology partners who share our goals of making books more accessible and useful. Just a few weeks ago, Sony announced that over a million public domain we've digitized would be available on the Sony Reader. We've also partnered with Barnes and Noble to allow users in the US to browse and download public domain books from Barnes and Noble's eBookstore for free.

Bringing the world's books online is a tremendous undertaking, and we're happy to be working with more institutions and partners to help achieve this. We're always looking for more ways to expand access to books, and we envision a future where people throughout the world will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime.

For more information about Google Books, please visit http://books.google.com

Bringing the power of Creative Commons to Google Books

2009-08-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

Posted by Xian Ke, Associate Product Manager, Google Books

Today, we're launching an initiative to help authors and publishers discover new audiences for books they've made available for free under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Rightsholders who want to distribute their CC-licensed books more widely can choose to allow readers around the world to download, use, and share their work via Google Books.

Creative Commons licenses make it easier for authors and publishers to tell readers whether and how they can use copyrighted books. You can grant your readers the right to share the work or to modify and remix it. You can decide whether commercial use is okay. There's even an option to dedicate your book to the public domain.

If you're a rightsholder interested in distributing your CC-licensed book on Google Books, you have a few different options. If you're already part of our Partner Program, you can make your book available under CC by updating account settings. If not, you can sign up as a partner. You can select from one of seven Creative Commons options, and usage permissions will vary depending on the license.

We've marked books that rightsholders have made available under a CC license with a matching logo on the book's left hand navigation bar. People can download these books in their entirety and pass them along: to friends, classmates, teachers, and so on. And if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a mashup--say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube.

In return, people who download these books agree to use the work only in ways specified by the license, like giving proper credit to the author on any remixes or further public distributions.

This is just the beginning of this initiative. As authors and publishers tell us which works they want to share on Google Books under CC licenses, we'll be turning on the option to restrict your search to books you can share. In addition, representatives of the Book Rights Registry intend to allow rightsholders to distribute CC-licensed works for free (pending court approval of the settlement).

In the meantime, a few authors have already made their CC books available for you to download on Google Books, including:

55 Ways to Have Fun with Google by Philipp Lenssen
Blown to Bits by Harold Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry R. Lewis
Bound by Law? by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins
Code: Version 2 by Lawrence Lessig
Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel
Federal Budget Deficits: America's great consumption binge by Paul Courant, Edward Gramlich
The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
A World's Fair for the Global Village by Carl Malamud

We look forward to working with Creative Commons, authors, and publishers to bring even more content online for you to search, enjoy, and remix.

Update from the Google Books team: For those interested in dedicating works to the public domain, please refer to the CC0 FAQ for more information. We've updated this post to more clearly refer to CC0 as an option for authors and publishers.

Books are Full of Visual Gems: Early 20th century Japan edition!

2009-08-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Books Online Team

It may come as no surprise to the book nerds out there (you know who you are) that the annals of written history are full of visual gems.

Now, when you come across something interesting in a public domain title that has been scanned via our Library Project, you can easily add it to your own website or blog. Simply snag the chunk of text or image using our Clip feature in Google Books () and copy and paste the Embed HTML code onto your site.

I've lived in Japan on three different occasions, first as an exchange student and later during college. Many of us encounter and enjoy Japanese contemporary pop culture in our daily lives, but I've always been most interested in the history and arts of early 20th century Japan. I spent some time this week looking through the Google Books archives, focusing on items from the late Meiji period (1868 - 1912) and the Taisho period (1912 - 1926). Particularly fascinating to me is the Taisho period's cultural milieu, from which the Takarazuka Revue theater and pulp fiction author Edogawa Rampo sprung.

I used the Clip feature in Google Books to pull together a collection of images from early 20th century Japan. These books are written in English by American and European authors, and reflect a few of the Western perspectives on Japan of that era. They provide a unique snapshot of Japan from an interesting and important time in the country's history - simply click any image to read the original book source!

[Please note, some content may not be available in full view to users outside of the United States.]

Young Japan by James Augustin Brown Scherer [1905]

War With Japan? by Thomas Edward Green [1916]

Mysterious Japan by Julian Street [1921]

Working Women of Japan by Sidney Lewis Gulick [1915]

Sea-Girt Yezo by John Batchelor, Church Missionary Society [1902]

Announcing the 10 Days in Google Books game

2009-07-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Note: Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

Which infamous book thief got caught stealing from the Chicago public library and was later acquitted on grounds of insanity? How many European cities are mentioned in Karen Fowler's "The Jane Austen Book Club?" And can you figure out what curious objects Dorothy is picking from a tree in this illustration from Frank Baum's "Ozma of Oz?"

Stumped? Find the answers to these and other fun questions in the 10 Days in Google Books game. Each day, we'll ask you five trivia questions on a different theme. Search Google Books to find the answers with hints to help you along the way. After you answer each day's questions, you can enter a contest to win a Sony Reader. If you enjoy the game, come back the next day for another set of questions — and another chance to win.

For official rules, including prize descriptions, visit http://books.google.com/game. (Please note: Some books may not be available in full view to those outside the United States.) The first 20,000 people to play the game will also receive commemorative Google Books laptop stickers. So all you bookworms out there, start playing now!

The Google Books settlement and privacy: frequently asked questions

2009-07-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

The following are some questions we've heard about privacy and Google's proposed settlement agreement with authors and publishers, which is still subject to approval by the court. We've addressed many of them here, and may update this document as our product plans evolve. For more on privacy and the agreement, take a look at our blog post. Thanks for reading.

What is Google going to do to ensure reader privacy if the settlement is approved?

Important principles from our Google Privacy Policy would apply to this service, as with every Google service. For example, we will never sell personal information about our users. In fact, we will never share individual users' information at all unless the user tells us to, or in some very unusual circumstances that are spelled out in the Privacy Policy, like emergencies or when we receive valid legal process. The Book Rights Registry created under the settlement won't have access to users' personal information, either.

Users will also have choices about the kinds of information that Google receives when they use the service. Most of the new ways of reading books online that the settlement makes possible will not require any kind of registration or account with Google. For example, people who use institutional subscriptions, such as students at subscribing schools, will not have to register with Google to read the millions of books available through the subscription. They only need to confirm their identity to the school’s system – not ours. And of course, regular users of Google Books do not need to set up an account to get the benefits of the settlement. They will be able to see much larger portions of books – often 20% of the book, instead of the current three short snippets – without having an account or giving personal information to Google.

Will Google give data about individual users to the Book Rights Registry?

No. Google is not required under the settlement agreement to provide individual user data to the Registry, and will not be providing it. In fact, the settlement specifies that in circumstances where the Registry seeks this data, it should use legal processes to do so. The Registry will receive aggregate usage data that is needed for the allocation of revenues under the settlement agreement; however, this will not include information specific to individual users.

Will Google be selling data on what users read to other parties?

No. The Google Privacy Policy is clear that we do not sell users' personal information.

Will users have to get a Google account to use Google Books? What about students at colleges or universities?

Users of Google Books will not be required to have a Google account. Anyone can freely search Google Books and preview up to 20% of most books without logging into Google. For the institutional subscription, Google will conform to common practices adopted within the industry to protect user privacy: users will be authenticated either using the student's or the institution's IP address, or using other methods such as Shiboleth -- a technology that lets Google confirm that a user is part of a subscribing institution without knowing who that user is. For the Public Access Service terminals, authentication will be based upon IP and Google will not have information about the individual user.

If someone uses a free public access terminal in a public library, what data will you keep about them and what they read?

Unless that person chooses to log in to use a Google account, we will not have any information that would uniquely identify them when they access Google Books from a public access terminal in a public library.

Why weren't privacy provisions included in the settlement?

The settlement was a negotiation between the plaintiffs in the lawsuits and Google. It settles the copyright claims that were raised, and addresses the new uses authorized by the copyright holders under the settlement -- including detailed provisions for security of scanned files, and other considerations relevant to the lawsuit. It does not attempt to prescribe Google's product plans beyond the points that related to this authorization -- which is a good thing, both for users and for privacy. For one thing, the product has not yet been designed and developed, which makes detailed privacy policy drafting almost impossible. Also, with a product such as this, it is important to engage in discussions with the broader community and in particular with institutions such as libraries about the appropriate privacy policy for these services. Google has been actively engaging with representatives of the library community and other public interest groups to get input on what should be included. These discussions have been very helpful and we expect to continue to engage in these discussion as we develop our products.

What has changed in this document since it first went up?

Well, we added this FAQ about what has changed in this document since it first went up. Also, we revised the first question to make it clear that in addition to emergencies, there are other rare situations where we may disclose data, such as when we receive legally valid process -- meaning appropriately issued formal legal demands, such as search warrants or subpoenas. Full details about when and how we share information are in the Privacy Policy document.

Helping more people discover books across the web

2009-07-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

Posted by Larissa Fontaine, New Business Development Manager

At Google we've always believed in helping users discover more books, and that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. Back in March 2009, we worked with Sony to bring people access to over 500,000 public domain books on the Sony Reader for free. Today, Barnes & Noble, the largest book retailer in the US, announced that they are making over a half million public domain titles available for free via Google Books.

Readers on BarnesandNoble.com and their various reading applications will now be able to search, browse, and access this collection of fiction, scholarly, practical, and entertaining books, preserved by some of the world's greatest libraries. Look for these titles throughout BarnesandNoble.com, as indicated by the icon show below:

This partnership and announcement is yet one more step towards fulfilling our mission to enable people to discover and read public domain books anywhere.

Why I gave my book away for free

2009-07-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Chris Anderson, Author

My new book, FREE: The Future of a Radical Price, is about a counterintuitive notion: that you can make money by giving things away. Actually, it’s pretty surprising that is still controversial, given that it’s the foundation of the long-standing broadcast media model (radio and television are “free to air”, supported by advertising) to say nothing of the billions in profit made every year by my hosts here at Google. But Free is perhaps the most misunderstood four-letter word beginning with “F” in the English language, which is why I wrote a book about it. The debate the book has sparked is evidence of how polarizing and disruptive the concept still is.

Needless to say, a book called “FREE” should be free. Not necessarily free as in speech, but free as in beer: not libre, but gratis. It would be hypercritical, to say nothing of cowardly, to argue that you can make money by giving things away and not practice what I preach with my own book. But as readers of this blog know, the publishing industry does not yet operate on open source grounds, with authors making all the calls. So how and where to make the book free was a negotiation to be had with my publisher (Hyperion, a division of Disney) and retail partners, so that everyone felt they had the potential to benefit if the experiment was a success.

The basic business model of free books is “Freemium”, the combination of free and paid premium versions of a product. Meanwhile, the basic thesis of FREE is that since the marginal cost of bits is close to zero, smart companies should "round down" and use free as a form of marketing to reach the largest possible audience with free samples, ideally upselling potential customers on something else. In this case, it seemed clear that the “premium” form of the book is the physical book, in its atoms form.

As the editor of a dead-tree magazine, I’m often asked whether print is itself dead. It may be for newsprint, but some paper still adds value in an Internet age. What we do with the packaging of photography, design and long-form journalism in the paper version of Wired is still impossible to recreate in HTML, and I feel even more strongly about the physical charms of a hardcover book. As much as I love the convenience of the Kindle, it’s hard to beat the battery life, page resolution, portability, skimability, giftability and sheer shiny beauty of a well-made hardcover, as the bookshelves throughout our home testify. A physical book is an artifact, not just information. My very digital kids feel the same way: they may never read a printed newspaper, but they love physical books as much as I did when I was their age.

After studying what other authors had done with free digital books, my publisher and I decided to make FREE free in as many formats as possible to encourage sampling without competing too much with the premium hardcover. It's free on Google Books, Scribd, the Amazon Kindle (and Kindle iPhone app) and Shortcovers (these are time limited, from one week to one month). The full unabridged audiobook is free at iTunes, Audible.com and as downloadable MP3s at Wired.com (no time limits). Even the physical book will be free, in paperback form in the UK, thanks to deal by which Adobe brands and sponsors the book and BrandRepublic distributes it on request.

The aim of all this is to lower the barrier to entry to sampling the book. Our bet is that Free will expose the book to the largest possible audience, with the hope of converting a fraction of them to paying customers. Obviously, much depends on that sample being a positive experience (judge for yourself) and us being right that many people still value hardcover books as we do. But so far, the evidence seems to be positive. As I write this, a week after publication, about 100,000 people have read the digital book for free on Google Books and Scribd. And, this afternoon, I got word that the book would enter the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller list at #12 in its first week. Maybe, just maybe, Free worked!

Update from the Google Books team: After a one-month trial, Free is now in limited preview on Google Books. We will continue to partner with publishers and authors to explore new opportunities for promoting books on Google for free.

@googlebooks on Twitter

2009-07-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

Posted by Okan Kolak, Research Engineer

As Joseph Addison put it, "reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body". So to help you get your daily exercise, starting today we're offering you a new channel to explore the Google Books index, by posting popular or quirky book quotes on Twitter .

For starters, we've chosen our favorite quotes from Popular Passages identified by our algorithms (as always, you can also find Popular Passages on the Book Overview page). If you click on the links in each tweet, you'll be able to see the quote in context on the page. From time to time, we will tweet about new features and product updates, as well.

Here are some of our first tweets:

Please note that some of the books may not be viewable internationally - see the Google Books help center for more information.

To follow our posts, go to twitter.com/googlebooks and click "Follow".

University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Texas expand Google Books agreements

2009-07-09T10:27:00.000-07:00

Posted by Tamar Fruchtman, Senior Corporate Counsel

In May, the University of Michigan announced an expanded agreement with Google that will take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States.

Today, two more longstanding library partners--the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas--have also expanded their partnerships with Google. That means that if the agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from these two libraries as well. This includes gems from Wisconsin's Native American collection and from UT-Austin's Benson Latin American collection.

Google was founded on the principle of making information more accessible to more people, so we're excited that UW-Madison and UT have joined in our efforts to bring these books to more people around the country. You can read more at the UW-Madison and UT-Austin websites.

Books Are Full of Visual Gems: 19th century fashion edition!

2009-07-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Books Online Team

It may come as no surprise to the book nerds out there (you know who you are), but the annals of written history are full of visual gems.

When you come across something amazing in a public domain title scanned via our library project, you can simply snag the chunk of text or image using our Share this Clip feature in Google Books (). Then, simply take the Embed HTML code and copy and paste it in to your site or blog to add it.

Today, on the birthday of fashion designer Pierre Cardin, I was thinking about the shifting trends of fashion and their depiction in print media. Exquisite (and often hilarious) public domain materials from the early days of American fashion magazines can be found within the archives of Google Books. This includes complete issues of Harper's Magazine and The Delineator, one of the premier women's fashion magazine at the turn of the century.

I used the Share this Clip feature to pull together this small collection of 19th and early 20th century fashion writing. Simply click any image to view the original book source!

[Please note, some content may not be available in full view to users outside of the United States.]

Harper's Magazine

The Delineator

Fashion in Deformity by William Henry Flower

Etiquette in society, in Business, in Politics and at Home by Emily Post

Harper's Magazine

School Sewing Based on Home Problems by Ida Robinson Burton

New ways to search within a book

2009-07-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

Posted by Casey Ho, Software Engineer

At Google we want to make it easy for you to find the information you need. As such, we've made searching for passages within a book part of the core experience of Google Books.

Earlier this month we revamped the search experience to make searching inside a book easier. You can now view the context of a search result, sort results by relevancy or page order, and flip through results quickly while viewing the book.

Today I'm excited to announce one more addition to the experience of searching a book: search results in your scrollbar. Now when you search in a book, little hints will appear in the margin to indicate where you results are located. When you hover over one of these annotations, you'll get a quick preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to the associated page. Here I searched Aunt Mary's New England Cook Book for pie recipes:

Previously, it was difficult to get a feel for where results were located in a book. You could count the page numbers and make a guess, but that's hardly efficient. Now there is a strong visual display of result locations, and often clusters will form around particular chapters or passages. This will help you navigate more easily between pages which contain your search term.

These annotations will both make navigation between results quicker and help users jump to the correct result.

As always, feel free to provide feedback. Happy searching!

Explore a book in 10 seconds

2009-07-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Diego Puppin, Software Engineer

In his 1979 novel Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (If on a winter's night a traveler), Italian writer Italo Calvino imagines a character, Lotaria, who uses an "electronic brain" to read her books. Her computer can read a book "in a few minutes", and show her all the words in it, sorted by frequency. In fact, Calvino was fascinated by the research of Mario Alinei, who in the late 1960s created Spogli Elettronici dell'Italiano Contemporaneo, an academic analysis of Italian literary masterworks (including Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno).

Alinei's team looked at words used in the Italian language over time, noting changes in their frequency. You can imagine how this work was done forty years ago: operators punching computing cards, a big mainframe computer being fed words overnight, and an encoded output that had to be typeset again into book form.

Now our computing infrastructure can do Alinei's work in a few seconds. Starting today, you'll find a cloud of "Common Terms and Phrases" on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

As with the other features on the Book Overview page, the word cloud is meant to offer a new way to explore our catalog. If you are trying to learn about Italian art, a search in our index will find many good books on the Renaissance period. Use the cloud of common terms to tell what each book is about. For example, The Renaissance is more focused on the "canon" of art (see the emphasis to beauty, Greek models, poetry of art), while Renaissance Art casts light on the role of patrons in the art scene (patrons, commission, family). After this 10-second glance at the contents, you can choose which book to study next. Happy reading!

Orwell: Author and Dishwasher

2009-06-26T00:16:00.000-07:00

Posted by Roland Lange, Strategic Partner Development Manager

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair 106 years ago on June 25. He is most famous for his last book 1984- one of the most influential books of the 20th century and still blowing minds in the 21st- but rather than offer another high school essay on that grim masterpiece here on the Inside Google Books blog, we want to celebrate and re-introduce his awful but amazingly entertaining first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (among this blogger's favorite books).

Before there was Anthony Bourdain, Orwell blew the lid off the restaurant scene. Down and Out... is a fictionalized story of his life in the late 1920s as a dishwasher in Paris and a tramp in the classic sense of the word in London. As a plongeur he takes the reader into the kitchen of several prominent restaurants. The conditions he describes are not for the faint of heart, though you will read with absolute awe and not a little guilty pleasure. Orwell tartly summarizes one of his employers thus:

"...I used to wonder whether there could be a worse restaurant in the world than ours."

Many people have had a subpar meal, but few expect that their meat or fish spent the night on the floor covered by straw! The book was originally published in 1933 and really tells it like it was. (And don't ask about the over-used bathwater in a charity house in London.)

Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Famous Facial Hair edition!

2009-06-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Books Online Team

It may come as no surprise to the book nerds out there (you know who you are), but the annals of written history are full of visual gems.

When you come across something amazing in a public domain title scanned via our library project, you can simply snag the chunk of text or image using our Share this Clip feature in Google Books (). Then, simply take the Embed HTML code and copy and paste it in to your site or blog to add it.

This past April, I decided to cease shaving and see what kind of beard I'd grow if left to my own devices. After five longs weeks, all I'd managed was an unruly and wimpy beard and decided to shave it off. For my next attempt, I'm looking to Google Books for inspiration, and put together this collection of famous facial hair using the Share this Clip feature.

[Please note, some content may not be available in full view to users outside of the United States.]

Major General Ambrose E. Burnside and the Ninth Army Corps by Augustus Woodbury

Nietzsche by Paul Elmer More

New Outlook by Alfred Emanuel Smith

A Complete Life of Gen. George A. Custer by Frederick Whittaker

Asgard and the Gods by Wilhelm Wägner

Anecdotes of the Medical World and Curiosities of Medicine by John Timbs