Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Google Print

I must interrupt our regular transmissions to let you know about a fantastic new Google tool that will transform the lives of historians and archivists everywhere - Google Print. What it does is, it allows you to run a search term and find it directly in books that Google has scanned into its database. This database is growing rapidly, and includes some rare and out-of-print books.

Yes, there are a few similar services out there, but this is the best I've seen in terms of searchability, and will only get better as more books and tomes are added.

For copyright reasons, you cannot simply read the whole book online - it only allows you to search for specific terms. But it does supply a table of contents and an index, which should make searching much, much easier.

This idea of a central storehouse of books searchable from anywhere in the world is a truly transformative technology. Hats off to Google.

3 comments:

Jonas said...
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Jonas said...

related news on this:

Google restarts scanning

MSN to scan British library

Dave and Stefan said...

Thanks weewhale!