Re: Google Book Search (was: Updates to website)

In message of 6 Dec, Stewart Baldwin <sbaldw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Dec 2005 02:13:33 +0000 (UTC), WJhonson@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
> >In a message dated 12/5/05 6:09:16 PM Pacific Standard Time,
> >no@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> >
> ><< Search the text at the beginning of the page (until it is hidden).
> > Then you may get a few words that follow.
> >
> > Search again with those more words until you get all the text. >>
> >
> >Yes but it would be a lot easier if they just let you click the "next page"
> >button instead of having to search and search over.
>
> In my opinion, even that is not sufficient, since I see no good reason
> why you shouldn't be able to download an entire book with one command,
> like you can at the Gallica website. (Here, I am talking about works
> that are in the public domain. Copyrighted works are obviously a
> different matter.) After all, this program is being advertised as one
> that will bring many public domain books into the hands of readers,
> who are then apparently expected to go through the tedium of getting
> them one page at a time in order to read them or to use them as
> references.

Totally agreed. It is a waste of my time to read through pages one at
a time over the net. If only I could download whole books, I could
process the pages much faster through direct reading from disc on my
machine here.

The other problem is that they use JPEGs which may not be scaled
correctly. It would be far better if they put the whole thing into PDF
files, giving an further advantage that it is far quicker to jump
between pages. The technology for this is well established on other
sites so I can't see why Google has to go for a relatively crude method.

--
Tim Powys-Lybbe                                          tim@xxxxxxxxx
             For a miscellany of bygones: http://powys.org
.