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

[Jim Campbell]

There certainly are other ways to get ahold of Tom Sawyer or Mansfield Park,
but we have a request from a visiting professor to put on reserve a volume
from a particular 19th century edition of the works of Friedrich Maximilian
Klinger. Hard to come by quickly on the antiquarian market and sort of silly
to go out and get 12 volumes when she needs about 50 pages for her class.
But now that we've figured out which link goes to that volume, we can make
it available to all the students.

Just as most libraries had persuaded themselves that just-in-time was a
better model than just-in-case Google has put the old model up again (at
least for pre-1923 titles if you happen to be in the US or have access to a
proxy server).
 
- Jim Campbell
 
Digital Access Coordinator and Librarian for German
E-Mail: Campbell at Virginia.Edu | Voice: 434-924-4985
 
Digital Access Services, University of Virginia Library
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/das/

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org 
> [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dowling
> Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 11:55 AM
> Cc: 'Web4Lib'
> Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Google Allows Downloads of 
> out-of-copyright Books
> 
> On 8/30/2006 11:27 AM, Roy Tennant wrote:
> 
> > On 8/30/06 8:16 AM, "David J. Fiander" <dfiander at uwo.ca> wrote:
> > 
> >> Leslie Johnston wrote:
> >>
> >>> It's definitely not consistently available yet, but 
> here's an example:
> >>>
> >>> 
> http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC18938030&id=HKackp-vG-YC&pg=PA
> >>> 9&lpg=PA9
> >>> &dq=abbott+flatland
> >> It's also only available within the United States.  While 
> Flatland is 
> >> most definitely in the public domain worldwide, we 
> Canadians only get 
> >> to see excepts, as if it was still a restricted text.
> > 
> > This is one of my gripes about Google Books. Although the 
> work itself 
> > may be clearly in the public domain, if a publisher has 
> republished it...
> 
> 
> Google Books is primarily a funnel to get users to online 
> book sellers (similarly, Google Scholar is a funnel to get 
> users to pay-per-article download sites).  That's why they're 
> okay with having a lousy e-book interface; it's really a 
> passable retail catalog interface.
> 
> I also wonder how useful it is - or at least, how likely it 
> is to be used - to have a freely downloadable PDF of Tom 
> Sawyer that weighs in at 15MB (for about 400k of text) or 
> Mansfield Park at over 20MB (text size 890k).  I know it 
> isn't a 28kbps world any more, but still.
> 
> 
> --
> Thomas Dowling
> tdowling at ohiolink.edu
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