[Web4lib] Google Allows Downloads of out-of-copyright Books

[Karen Coyle]

Right, thanks Jonathan. I hadn't gone far enough into the book (duh!). 
The Google boilerplate at the beginning is readable, but the other pages 
get a pre-Hal voice saying (monotonically) "warning empty page". 
Presumably not a comment on the Google founder ;-)

kc

Jonathan Gorman wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 30 Aug 2006, Karen Coyle wrote:
>
>> On the plus side, you can have your computer read it aloud, which is 
>> not possible with most commercial e-books since this is considered to 
>> be covered under a separate "performance" contract with the author.
>
> Unless I missed something, the pdfs are just images, no text included 
> at all. You seem to be agreeing with that in your earlier points 
> (can't copy/paste etc).  I don't have time to deconstruct them now, 
> but it sounds right.
>
> But if that's the case, you'll still need to run some sort of OCR to 
> get the "script" for a computer program to "speak it".  If you do that 
> you get some of the advantages you posted before....
>
>
> So is google offerring some sort of accessability service I'm not 
> aware of?
>
> Quite curious,
>
> Jon Gorman
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>
>

-- 
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------