[Web4lib] "hacking" Google Book Search to get whole contents

[Ryan Eby]

Just to prevent confusion it should probably be noted that these books
are the ones that are part of the publisher program and not likely the
library one. The publishers give permission to show more that just
snippets which will allow problems like this. Amazon also has this
problem which I have used in the past with deadlines. This type of
thing would be much more difficult for books that are displayed with
the snippet view though I suppose you can find a string at the end of
your snippet to search for to get another sentence. An overview of the
various views are here:

http://books.google.com/googlebooks/screenshots.html

Ryan Eby

On 11/28/05, Leo Robert Klein <leo at leoklein.com> wrote:
> Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> > This (juvenile) forum post shows a pretty simple way to get the whole
> > contents of a book by progressively searching for terms on subsequent
> > pages.
> >
> > http://www.techenclave.com/forums/read-any-book-google-techenclave-exclusive-6234.html
> >
> > Summary:
> > Find a term within a book you'd like to read.
> > Execute a search on that.  Book Search will let you see the preceeding
> > and subsequent 3 pages.
> >>From the first/last page in that context view, take a, uh, statisticly
> > improbably search phrase, and repeat your search.  This will basically
> > shift your window into the book to the earlier/later pages.
>
> Schees, it'd be a whole lot easier to borrow the thing from a library
> and type it out.  If I were going to bootleg publications on a massive
> scale, that's how I'd go about it.
>
> LEO
>
> -- -------------
> Leo Robert Klein
> www.leoklein.com
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